Author: themshow

For the first time ever (in more than 2 years) I actually lost a podcast. I’ve never had my batteries run out on my digital recorder and rather than let it do its own shutdown I interrupted it and lost the file. To make the disaster story even better, it was a solo fill-in Marketing Over Coffee, b/c Christopher Penn’s flights were screwed up.

I need to go to bed so I am bailing – entertain yourself with some great haiku/cartoons and another tale of disaster, and yet another.

Just not enough time in the day…

Lots of cool stuff going on, not the least of which was WebInno 13 which was a packed house. More on that tomorrow after I’ve had some sleep, but some of the non-tech highlights included getting some microphone wisdom from David Tames, finally getting to meet Bahlactus (aka Clarence) in person (and forgetting to mention that I laid the smackdown on Galactus last week, finally finishing Marvel Ultimate Alliance), seeing Brogan, and learning about Chip’s new thing. Not to mention another clash of the titans with a supervillian.
The lovely Carin has a broken toe so I had to bail on the dinner afterwords and didn’t get a chance to say my farewell’s but the group was well on the way to taking over the Cheesecake Factory.

Since this post is totally lacking any real content, let me direct you to Mr. Godin, who has a great post that has had me thinking all week. I now have some reusable bags in my car for the grocery store, I never realized how many places will give you credit if you bring your own bag (and a million less bags is a good thing).

The problem is that for some reason, just because MS-Word is so central to most business writing, I have this feeling that it should be immune to code bloat and feature creep. The latest version is what, something like Word 14.0? Why did it take me a half hour to get bullets that would show up properly when I output to a PDF?

It just strikes me as not possible that I would have to layout my resume on pagemaker (or whatever it’s called in CS3), for the love of god, I sound like a 95 year old man bitching about the price of bread.

Just to make things more fun it’s the beginning of the dead zone. Everywhere I’ve worked July and August are the crappiest possible months to work – and yet I actually wonder why people scratch their heads wondering where the business is, while at the same time ignoring emails and calls from salespeople because of vacations, sales kickoffs, trade shows, etc…

I almost saw a pedestrian get killed today in Wellesley of all places (a tony Boston Suburb), I’m getting a little creeped out about seeing so many accidents and other violence… maybe it’s just telling me to go see The Transformers (I hope).

Off to edit the latest Marketing Over Coffee for release tonight!

Taking it easy through Thursday but you can still check out today’s M Show, and I’ll have some Flickr Pics up later today.

I drive on Boston’s Route 128 (known as “The Yankee Division Highway” to a select few, or “The Yank” to the most townie insiders) for about 10 miles each way to work daily. It’s about as hardcore as highway driving gets. The speed limit is 55 but 70 is more like the reality. Having driven it long enough I’ve found two cardinal rules that work well:

1. Speeding is ok as long as you don’t change lanes. Changing lanes is the most dangerous thing to do on the Yank, everyone passes on both sides and when you are looking at your blind spots to change lanes you’re not watching your own lane which is as dangerous as it gets.
2. Keep stopping space in front of you. No matter how fast, slow or busy it is, never tailgate. Always have space to stop or a lane to bail to. A split second mistake and you get this:

This was today, a Saturday when traffic was pretty heavy. We saw this car zipping all the way across 4 lanes more than once within a mile. About a mile later all lanes were almost stopped and I got this shot. There was another car driving aggressively and it looks like things didn’t work out.