Almost As Good As Chocolate

I’m spring fall cleaning my digital life. It is truly incredible how much digital junk one can collect and how many digital chores exist. And just like the offline world where every new acquisition of an item leads to extra work (cleaning the item, taking care of it, insuring it if appropriate etc.), every user account, every digital image and every blog needs work.

The volume of data is just ridiculous. Let’s start with email – I started sending email in 1993 (CompuServe baby!) and while I don’t have those emails, I have email dating back to 1995! Maybe it is because I am a bit of a pack rat when it comes to email, but sorting through, categorizing, importing, archiving and ensuring the email is in the right format (making all the Windows emails Mac compatible) has been quite a task.

Then there’s the music. A few years ago, R and I combined our music. We have over a 100 gigs of it… figuring out a solution where we can both share the music but keep it in sync has been a huge challenge. It still doesn’t work all the time, but at now, we set up a Mac Mini as a shared server and plug the music drive in to share it. Works most of the time…

Photos have exploded this year. And again, it’s something we want both people to have access to. So, you need to tag them, sort them and ensure the memory cards are downloaded. Oh, the tags have go cross platform (windows and mac). And if you shoot in RAW, you need to convert them to JPGs to store them on your computer and the “negatives” can remain on a hard drive. Damn, the work flow is complex!

Online passwords have to be maintained. I have no idea the number of sites where I have passwords, much less which email I used with it and what on earth the password even is.

Oh, and le blogs… is it so hard to pop open a tab and update it? Not really, but given all the other digital cleaning I’m doing, I’ve felt overwhelmed and reluctant to post…

And given all this digital organizing, the real world organizing has taken a back seat. So for a few weeks, I’ll have to focus on that and while I do, my digital stuff will get messy again. So I will focus on the digital for a bit again and while I do that… the cycle of life… argh!

_{Picture from the Apple store}

For a whole bunch of reasons, I couldn’t be near a TV when Michael Phelps was swimming the 100M Butterfly for his seventh gold of the Olympics. But I really wanted him to win and, eager to know what happened, I called someone who gave me the play-by-play as it happened.

Once I got near a TV/computer, I watched the fantastic race and continued to stay amazed that the guy won.

It all comes down to the fact that Cavic took a long final stroke and “coasted” to the wall while Phelps took an extra stroke to hit the wall first. But if you want to be totally convinced, these pictures (from Sports Illustrated, where there are more images) will quench your thirst.

Phelps is on the left, bare chested; Cavic is on the right in the suit

As an aside, I find that being an American citizen for the first time during an Olympics has a marked bearing on my rooting for American atheletes.

I loved the movie Born Free when I was a kid and so this video is very “aww…” inducing.

More info here.

When the iPhone first came out, I desperately wanted one, but refused to switch my carrier to AT&T (which has incredibly bad service in Manhattan). Plus, I needed a phone I could unlock so I could use a local SIM while I traveled out of the country.

And by the time the first gen iPhone was unlocked, the 2nd gen one was looming large. So I waited.

Now the second gen iPhone, the 3G one is out. But… it is not yet unlocked. It will most certainly be jailbroken¹, but unlocked ²? Not sure.

So I am spending some time this weekend following the incredible hackers from the iPhone Dev Team. Here’s hoping they can unlock the 3G baseband. Then I can *finally* have the phone without having to live with terrible service.

1. Jailbreaking an iPhone is where you can run any application on it, not just Apple approved apps ↩

2. Unlocking an iPhone makes it usable on any GSM carrier – T-Mobile in the US and any GSM carrier worldwide ↩

The March 2008 edition of the HBS Bulletin had a little piece about the first women MBA students.

“A ‘Daring Exper-iment’: Harvard and Busi-ness Education for Women, 1937–1970,” tells the story of how coeducation at HBS evolved from an eleven-month certificate program in “personnel administration” at Radcliffe College (1937–1945), to the Management Training Program (1946–1955), to the Harvard-Radcliffe Program in Business Administration (1956–1963) — the last step before complete integration took place with the admission of eight women into the MBA Class of 1965.

But what’s even more interesting is a letter to the editor that showed up in the current issue (June 2008) –

Your March article “A History of Women at HBS” omitted an important category — women in the early sixties who were not admitted to the firstyear at HBS. Instead, their only option was to attend a separate and unequal first-year class at the Harvard-Radcliffe Program in Business Administration, a nondegree program. The women were then allowed to apply for the second year at HBS, and fewer than ten were accepted. In the second-year program, they were given no housing or section designation, and a professor could deny entrance to his course.

When job interviews started on campus, women’s names were scratched from the interview list. Recruiters refused to interview them because it was a “waste of time.” I know, because this happened to me. I was part of this forgotten class.

Joan Oxman Rothberg

(HRPBA 1962, MBA ’63)

Summit, NJ

Wow – scratched off the interview list! Incredible how far we’ve come. And that’s an excellent thing.

Each time you’re about to throw away an empty container — for ketchup, cereal, pickles, milk, macaroni, paper towels, dog food or whatever — you just pass its bar code under the scanner. With amazing speed and accuracy, the Ikan beeps, consults its online database of one million products, and displays the full name and description.

In a clear, friendly font, the screen might say: “Nabisco Reduced Fat Ritz Crackers 14.5 Oz.,” for example. Now you can toss the box, content that its replacement has been added to your shopping list.

After a few days of this, you can review the list online at Ikan.net — and if everything looks good, click once to have everything delivered to your house at a time you specify.

Maybe it’s not exactly a Food-a-Rac-a-Cycle. But at least it’s the Netflix of groceries.
State of the Art – Grocery Shopping Made Easy – NYTimes.com

The next revision of this will be a smaller, lighter scanner. When that happens AND when (if?) they integrate with Fresh Direct or Whole Foods, I am SO there.

originally uploaded by andy in nyc.

As adults, we don’t enjoy being in the rain. We may say we enjoy the rain, but it is as a distant observer – we ourselves need to be warm, dry and inside to enjoy the cool, wet outside.

I really can’t think of a single time in my adult life that I’ve been stuck in downpour and enjoyed it.

Well, all that changed last night. I had to head out to run some errands. It had rained all afternoon and so I convinced myself that it couldn’t possibly rain anymore (er, what?!) and head out blithely without an umbrella. Finished grocery shopping at Whole Foods and headed out to discover the torrential rain coming down.

After standing under the awning and whining with other shoppers about how we forgot our umbrellas, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I voluntarily got drenched… and had fun doing it.

So, I ensured my bag with phone and iPod was firmly closed and I stepped out from under the awning and crossed the street. I was soaked by the time I got to the other end. But I didn’t melt.

And by the time I got to the next block, I was having a great time. As I happily walked along, people standing in storefronts would smile and laugh. I just smiled back and enjoyed a leisurely walk home. It was brilliant. I was completely soaked through, but it was an awesome feeling! A warm shower and hot tea were perfect to round out my evening.

Growing up has many advantages, but when did I become so uptight that I couldn’t truly experience the rain anymore? I would encourage everyone to let go a little and play in the rain – at least once a decade! 🙂

In the past couple of years, Social Networks have changed online behavior. If you want to dig deeper into Social Networks, Social graphs, games, apps and all the other buzz words doing the rounds these days, the Graphing Social Patters conference in Washington DC is the one to go to.

If I was more mobile, I’d schlep out there from June 9th through the 11th.

Besides the speaker list and all the panels, another thing that makes this conference much more interesting is Mr. Facebook himself, my buddy and the Program Chair, Dave McClure 🙂

Dave wanted me to let you know that –

If you are a starving geek, you can get a 30% off discount by using the following reg code: gspe08fgd

And if you’ve built an app & want to enter the AppNite demo contest, you can get a 50% off discount by entering your app here.

Good luck, Dave – I am sure it will be awesome.

Paul Graham’s article about cities focuses on Cambridge, Silicon Valley and New York. Each city, according to Graham, sends a message:

Cambridge says “you should be smarter” – it is the city of intellect, the city of ideas.

Silicon Valley says “you should be more powerful” – it is the city of startups.

New York says “you should make more money” – it is the city of wealth/finance.

I’ve had the good fortune of living in all three places and I disagree with Paul about his take on New York (I also have a quibble about Silicon Valley, but we’ll get to that).

Cambridge definitely has the intellectual vibe. You feel it everywhere you go. But Cambridge is tiny. TINY. Once I graduated, I moved out of Cambridge and it was a completely different story. Davis Square is where Tufts is. It should be diverse, but every evening as I walked home from the T¹, old white men sitting on their porches would stare at me as if I were from Mars. I’d walk by thinking “Come on, people! It is 1997!!! What’s so unusual about a brown chick?!” Then there’s Boston. Can you say homogeneous?? Even if it had every smart person in the world, I hope I don’t have to live there again.

Silicon Valley is wonderful. I spent seven incredible years there. And it is definitely about startups. But it is not just about power. It is also about money – where more money puts you higher on the status totem pole. A lot of discussions in Silicon Valley² are about who made how much by selling to which company at the right time. And even if the crass component of “how much” someone made is not front and center, it is hovering in the wings. The infinitely more elegant “he’s done”³ is a commonly heard phrase.

And now we come to New York. I’ll be honest – when I moved here from Silicon Valley, I was quite miserable⁴. I missed California – the attitude, the people, the work, the weather, the calm, the space… everything. But as I spent more time in NYC, the more I started to enjoy it.

Yes, New York has its share of finance “neanderthals in suits”, but you really don’t have to see any of them if you don’t want to. In NYC, I can go days or weeks without having a conversation about technology if I so choose. And I’ve gone 5 years without having a single conversation about finance. In Silicon Valley, even the accountants and lawyers work for tech companies! In NYC, I meet people who have never heard of Twitter, Skype, TechCrunch or Valleywag. These people are dancers, artists, museum curators, actors, yoga instructors, photographers, architects… and that’s just in my building!! And none of these people are focused on making more money – they are focused on making an impact on their field – on being the best dancer/artist/curator/actor/yoga instructor/photographer/architect that they can be. I don’t know where Paul lived, but I have never felt like finance people are crawling all over NYC. Not once.

Professionally, my life in NYC has been about film and technology. There are some great startups in this city and every day, I see more being formed. And NYC is the indie film capital of the country with one of the best film schools in the world.

Personally, I’ve been privileged to go to the finest museums in the world – The Met, MoMA, Whitney and Guggenheim, attend stunning opera and ballet, watch free concerts in the park, eat at some of the best restaurants in the world, visit art galleries that are discovering wonderful new talent, listen to leading classical artists from India and the rest of the world perform here, attend lectures by Nobel Laureates, and take some wonderful classes in writing and film.

New York really has almost everything you can ask for. And because of its variety, it allows you to tailor your experience of it. You could see New York as just the artistic capital of the world, or just the culinary capital of the world, or just the indie film capital of the world. Or, as Paul did, the finance capital of the world.

And to me that says that New York is an incredibly diverse, incredibly interesting city. To someone who is open to the wealth⁵ of diversity that New York has to offer, to someone who is willing to sample the different facets, the city’s message is loud and clear – you should have a rich life!

1. the Tube, Boston’s subway system ↩

2. This article and this one both capture the wealth focus of Silicon Valley ↩

3. Implying they are set for life and need never work another day ↩

4. In fact, back then, R would never have believed I could write a post like this 🙂  ↩

5. Pun intended ↩

Watching an opera at The Met is an incredible experience. But not everyone lives in New York. This past year was the second season where people could watch the operas, live, in theaters.

The Met’s transmissions of eight live performances to movie theaters reached 908,000 people, more than the total number who attended performances at the house this season (about 850,000). The transmissions do not yet earn a profit, but they do pay for themselves, Mr. Gelb said, through ticket sales and rebroadcasts on public television.

The 2007-08 season showed in theaters in the US and in many countries around the world.

This is a wonderful way for The Met to increase participation. Opera can be viewed as stuffy, old-school and inaccessible. Showing it in movie theaters at a reasonable ticket price ($22 in the US), allows people to check it out without too much of a commitment. It also allows opera lovers around the world to access the performances.

The next step is to stream the performances online. The movie theater screenings in the US (including three theaters in NYC and one in Long Island) did not reduce the attendance at The Met at all –

Against that background and the national economic downturn, the Met has some encouraging box-office figures. The company sold 88 percent of the house this season, an 11.3 percent increase from two years ago. Out of a total of 219 performances, 127 (58 percent) sold out, up from 10 percent in 2005-6, Joseph Volpe’s final season as general manager, and 40 percent last season, Mr. Gelb’s first.

Those who are able to attend a live performance at Lincoln Center (time, location, money), will certainly continue to do that. There is no way a movie theater or a computer screen can replace that experience. The Met could charge a fee for viewing the performances online if streaming for free is too hard to swallow. That initiative could bring The Met a whole new group of followers who are much more likely to buy tickets if they are in New York during the season.

I certainly hope that Mr. Gelb is willing to be that bold.

_{Quotes from this NY Times article}