The Boston Globe, as previously mentioned, is a mere shell of its former self. You can still get good quality newswriting there, the problem is that more and more of it comes from New York or the Associated Press. I miss the true local coverage. But those are the economics of the times and the economics of new media. You just can’t replace physical subscription revenue with online display ads where you shoot ducks or whatever. But the Globe Reader is an interesting direction. I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a Kindle. I’ve seen other people with it and it’s so…..tiny. So it would be handy. The screen is quite beautiful, too. But I think I toe the line somewhere between a new media junkie and an old world fuddy-duddy, because I’m having a hard time imagining myself reading a book or a newspaper on an electronic gadget of any kind. So many people in my age group have told me, though, that they felt the same way – until they got one. So we’ll see.
The cloudy, murky, infuriating world of health insurance got more wacky with this mammogram thing this week. It seems insane to me that women wouldn’t be encouraged to get mammograms until they are in their 50’s, but I admit that I haven’t really followed the story all that much so I don’t know the gory details. I can’t bear to, because I know I’ll just get mad. That says a lot about American healthcare – that I can’t bother to inform myself in detail about it because I’ll just get upset. I know it’s a complicated subject, but I’m just so tired of the politics. Does it really matter who is president?
CNN posts the Top 10 Internet Moments of the Decade. I’m coming to love the end of decades now because the excessive amount of list-making is pure entertainment. That said, I’m taking seriously my quest to find my favorite music of the decade. Anyway, Google’s launch of AdWords is #2 on the list (Craigslist was first). AdWords is the machine for advertisers to buy keywords online and show their ads on search results pages. To say it revolutionized the internet is a bit of an understatement. I started working at Ask before Google launched this product and it is safe to say that I would not still be at Ask if Overture never invented it and Google didn’t nearly-perfect it. Anyway, it’s a fun list.
An interesting piece on baseball, salary caps and scheduling from Howard Bryan on ESPN.com. As a Red Sox fan, I’ve already made my point here about how I think baseball is broken. This last season my interest really waned in baseball because I’m tired of always seeing the same teams in the playoffs nearly every year. There are some interesting points in the article that refute the idea of salary cap, but I’m not buying it. Oh, every now and then a dark horse wins it, sure, but the league needs balance and anyone who tells you that MLB has it is using smoke and mirrors. It’s really too bad.
1. Seems whenever I wash my hands, I always then have to pee. This doesn’t happen after I pee of course, but let’s say I’ve just changed a diaper and need to wash my hands. During the hand washing or just after, the need to pee comes out of nowhere. So I pee, then I have to wash my hands again. Does this ever happen to you? It’s been happening to me all my life. I’m also glad nobody pulled the “dip Jeff’s finger in a cup of warm water” prank as kids. I may have been in trouble if such an incident had occured.
2. I am at the store. Whatever I am purchasing comes to, say, $3.19. Or $3.59. Or $3.99. I dig into my wallet – and I have $3.00. This seems to happen to me an awful lot – I have the amount of single dollar bills, but not the change. So I either have to put it on a card or break a $20. It’s no big deal and it doesn’t bother me, but why does it always happen that way? Again, does this happen to you?
Finally, someone left a comment here this week about my Facebook post and I wanted to clarify something. I am not deleting friends solely because I find their updates are boring. I delete friends because I don’t know them well enough. Example: brothers or sisters of people from school days who I might have said hello to once. It was my mistake in the first place to accept the invite to connect. Just wanted to make that more clear.
I read somewhere yesterday that young people don’t even email anymore. Most of their communication is now done via texting, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. In my eyes, these are all basically email vehicles – the concept is more-or-less the same. The most-often used method of communicating on these sites is messaging, really, just like an email. The only difference is that with the sites listed above, you’re doing it in a community environment vs. a direct message to an email address.
In thinking about my own usage and putting aside work, where email is still the predominant method of communication (especially for me, given I’m a remote employee), I very rarely use traditional email for non-work communication, either. Most catching up or checking with friends is done via Facebook or even IM. MySpace is a complete wasteland at this point. Too bad Fox Interactive didn’t sell it the year after they bought it. At this point, Twitter is fun but it’s not blood and veins, it’s candy.
Contact with close friends and family is mostly a phone call. I can’t even remember the last time I launched an actual email client like Outlook for personal email. Most retail emails and shipping confirmations go to my GMail box. It won’t be long, either, before you’ll be able to dial up your friends and do video chat right on the computer or your television. These technologies exist now, yes, but in embryonic form. I’m waiting for someone to step up there and knock it out of the park. Someone will and it will be a game-changer.
But let’s get back to Facebook for a second. It’s usage is exploding. I’m getting invitations from people I haven’t spoken to for, say, 20 years. And it’s great! Many of these people are folks I spent nearly every day with from kindergarden to 12th grade, so it’s great and very interesting to see what they’re up to and being able to reconnect has been really fun, now that we’re not young and stuck in awkward teenagerdom.
Of course, I’m connected to closer friends and family as well. But what’s really interesting is that I get invitations from people who I went to the same high school with or whatever, but never really knew. Or brothers and sisters of classmates that I never even spoke to. I decline these. It’s not out of any kind of snobbery, trust me. If anything, I need to work on feeling better about myself. It’s just that I’d like my Facebook connections to be people I actually know. It’s not a friend race for me to see how many I can pile up, that just makes the whole experience unproductive and overwhelming.
Anyway, this has happened more than a few times. I get a friend request and I accept it, then realize a few weeks later that I’ve met this person once or twice and never really knew them! So I delete the connection. Yeah, there’s a little guilt in doing that, but having them as a connection and not communicating with them at all doesn’t do any good. Why should I care if someone I met once is grocery shopping or managing sick children? Just as they shouldn’t care what my Facebook status is. Still, I don’t know where I should draw the line in accepting or declining. I don’t know. I clearly don’t look at it the same way as many others do……..
Alas, if these are the kinds of things I’m struggling with these days, then my life is going pretty well, I suppose. I’ve also been trying to work ELO into a subject line. Check that one off the list!
Apparently the inauguration has already happened and Gary McIntyre, I don’t know whether or not I should commend you for having a sweet job or criticize you for having WAY WAY too much time on your hands. Just watch the video. Trust me.
So I bought a dishwasher at Lowe’s a couple of weeks ago. As I’m giving the guy all my information, he stops and says “is your father Dino?” I tell him yeah. Turns out my grandfather cooked for his sister’s wedding and he also used to date a cousin of mine or something. We talk for a few minutes and I’m a little freaked out that a person I’ve never met knows so much about me. He asks me things like “are your parents still over on South Meadow Road?” I tell him no, and I know he’s being friendly and all, but still…..freaky! I ask him if he had actually ever been to my parents house before and he said he hadn’t. But he remembers where they live from like 20 years ago? Huh? I’ll write it off to a good memory!
Anyway, this morning the plumber doing the installation calls me and is trying to arrange install & delivery of said dishwasher. I’m telling her when I’ll be here and when I won’t and at the end of every sentence she says in her special Massachusetts accent “ya got me?” Now, that’s just annoying. She said it like five times……
My Neil Young concert review from December seemed to generate quite a few comments, both on the blog and via email. I’ve been meaning to give attention to a comment left by a friend of mine named Frank Padellaro. Frank is a great guy and an astoundingly good singer who fronts a band called King Radio (one of their albums were released on my record label). His comment is so detailed and impressive, that I want you to read it if you haven’t already. I pretty much agree with everything Frank says.
My wife and I walked out on a Neil Young show in the Centrum some time around 1990. Sonic Youth and Social D opened up, both of whom were quite good. Neil came out on decided we all needed to see how loud and alternative he could be. He came off like a confused old fart playing bad rock (much like the Todd Rundrgren performance I just saw on Letterman). It was awful. I had seen him play before that at Jones Beach, just after Freedom came out, and it was unbelievable. Before that, I went to see his blues band croak out “This Note’s for You” which I would have walked out on, if I had been driving my own car. In the end, he played a great 5 song acoustic set that made it worth staying. So, with all the ups and downs, if you enjoyed the show, you should consider yourself playing with house money from this point forward.
The bigger picture is the inherent letdown of finally seeing one of your favorite artists live. The whole concept centers on the fact that this artist has been around the block a few times, so you’re pretty much ensuring that you’ll be seeing a show by someone way past their prime, in bad voice, with poor energy, without the spark and fire they probably had in spades when they built their well deserved reputation.
I’ve been to too many of these shows to count, and they nearly always leave me feeling the same way. I spend the first five minutes thinking, “Holy Crap! That’s famous recording artist Joe Shlobotnik! He’s actually here in front of me.” That is combined with the silly realization, “I’ve seen this guy in movies, videos and TV. He looks just like himself.” Then I’m good for 20 minutes of convincing myself he’s not some washed up has been. You get a couple flashes of genius and pretend that it is a good time. Finally, the boredom sets in. Look around the room. Check out some old guy with a pony tail wearing a 150 dollar made in China tour jacket. His wife is drinking a plastic yard of frozen margarita that cost $28. The boredom might be abated if the artist dips into some obscure catalog piece and it just happens to be MY FAVORITE SONG. Then, more boredom. There is a really depressing realization when the artist has left the stage and hasn’t played one of their most famous songs. Then the lame encore that surprises no one. As I make my way through the inevitable traffic snarl at the Odorono Deoderant Enormo Arena I think, “Well, I’ve got that out of the way. Joe Shlobotnik can die now.”
Consider the following list:
Rolling Stones
The Who
Paul McCartney
Randy Newman
Todd Rundgren
Cheap Trick
The Allman Brothers
Neil Young
The Cure
Depeche Mode
The Police
The Zombies
The Kinks
Lovin’ Spoonful
Tom Waits
Elvis Costello
The Pogues
Squeeze
Jethro Tull
ELO
Crosby Stills and Nash
The Pixies
Joe Strummer
That’s just off the top of my head. Nearly all of these shows were, by any standards other than nostalgia, simply terrible, and followed the formula above. The Rolling Stones and the Who were both professional but totally boring. Shane McGowan was the most embarassing performance I’ve ever seen, and some of the shows, like watching John Sebastian trying to croak out a song past his shattered vocal cords, were simply too sadly painful to endure. Cheap Trick, for some reason, sound exactly now like they did at Budokan. How in hell do they do that?!? That was awesome, but not transcendent. Randy Newman was not in the best voice, but was so damn funny everyone had a really great time, including me. Plus he played MY FAVORITE SONG. The 90 minutes just melted away. The only one who seemed to give off the spark you get from a great new band in their utter prime (like the first time I saw Sloan) was Tom Waits. He finished the show, and I told my friend Mike how much I liked it, but I thought only playing an hour, with no opening act was kind of a rip off. Mike looked at his watch and told me he played for nearly three hours. Incredible.
So, the motto is, go see new music in small venues, so that you can tell someone someday, “I saw the Police play at the Channel in ‘78, and they were the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.” That memory alone will tip the scale over a hundred mediocre arena reunion shows.
Stephanie and I had an interesting conversation the other night. What if we were get rid of Comcast entirely? Our phone would go away and we’d be on 100% cell. We’d have to pay for an internet connection, of course, but could get that through Verizon’s Fios. TV is easy – you can now get pretty much any show (HD and non) via the Apple TV, which we have. We only have about 4-5 shows that we watch regularly, so it’s not like we’d be breaking the bank for it.
Yes, other costs would go up (cell bill, internet since it’s not packaged) but it seems like we’d save some relatively significant money. This is a problem the cable companies are going to face sooner than later as Apple TV-type boxes make their way into people’s living rooms. Getting TV shows and movies via the internet instead of via your coaxial is coming fast!Â
Alas, there’s one major issue here – sports. Still can’t get that via Apple TV. And while I don’t watch much sports these days, I still want the option to watch it and it needs to be there and available to me, even if I only watch four games a year of whatever. But I can’t imagine it’ll be long before the pro sports leagues realize the importance of the “on demand” model and start piping it in to you the same way we’d get our shows – live via the Apple TV or some similar contraption, for a per game fee. Oh yes, I’d do that in a second.
So I’m not really a hardcore football or Patriots fan. If I have time, I’ll watch. And I’ll certainly watch the big playoff games, but other than that I have a million other productive things to do instead of parking it on the couch for 3-4 hours. That said, the loss of Tom Brady will at least make it more interesting to watch the Patriots this year, because it won’t be the same weekly systematic demolition. Just remember, everyone thought the Pats were in deep trouble when Bledsoe went down. ‘Member that time? Pats will take a hit for sure, but they’ll be competitive. Plus Belichick is too much of an stubborn ass to let it all get away from him. He wants to prove that he doesn’t need Brady to win. As much as I dislike him, he’s the perfect coach for these guys right now.
Microsoft’s Foldershare is the best private file sharing solution out there since the late, great Grouper shut down a few years back. I’ve tried 5 or 6 others since Grouper shut down and none are as easy or simple as Foldershare. Never overlook Microsoft, I suppose, although I’ll probably buy a Mac next time around.
