Wired and late breaking news

I was just at Barnes and Noble killing time and I picked up a copy of Wired to browse through. I ended up getting it because it's nice to have something to read on the can or during the many hours I have nothing better to do.

When I was checking out, the guy at the counter made friendly conversation by asking if I was getting it to "stay on top of things".

My thoughts went like this:

• Huh?
• Stay on top of things? With Wired?
• Oh he's joking
• Wait, he's not joking.
• Oh, hang on, he's a norm.

The guy was friendly and I said, in a friendly way, oh, not really, because, you know, it's in print so it's already about a month out of date. He nodded and smiled and I wandered off feeling like an alien.

I remember when I was reading Wired to stay on top of stuff. That was about 6 years ago. RSS feeds and iGoogle have changed all that for me. Now I enjoy Wired precisely because it's a little more relaxed. They've done the research for me, digested it, put some thought into the analysis. It's like the week in review for tech stuff (only not TWiT, I know).

Funny that Wired has moved from being cutting-edge for me to post-news roundup in the span of just a few years. Is it like that for anyone else reading the blog? I know both of you, and I've got my guesses.

The National Press Club, indeed?

I too like books and owls!

Good news from the transom today. It appears I'll have the opportunity to speak at the National Press Club next month. Before you gasp yourself incredulously to death, I should clarify that I won't be speaking "before" the National Press Club, but "at" it. Less "lend me your ears", more lend us your National Press Clubhouse.

ForumOne Communications has expressed interest in having me speak at a seminar they're putting together to be housed at the NPC. I'd be speaking about using the Internet and community for extending the reach and missions of non-profit companies. I've done that with mixed success before this job. I'd still like to use the Internet to pursue some public good even at this for-profit job I currently hold, and to be honest, it's probably harder to get community off the ground at a for profit because people keep wanting to monetize the community.

So, good news all around for me, since this is just the kind of gig that parlays into a misunderstanding, that further translates to paid speaking gigs. Plus someone will no doubt be pressed into taking a picture of me on the podium where it proudly reads "National Press Club".

I'll soon be kind of a big deal. (that's sarcasm)

A video from Oregon

Hey, so it's been some time since I posted to the blog. Mostly that's because I've been skipping and prancing and eating bon-bons. Some of the time was spent at work, sure, but I've promised in an earlier post not to dwell on that nonsense.

So, catching up, here's a delightful snapshot of some halcyon days when I wasn't working through the weekend, but instead shamelessly showing my face in the light of day during the hours when the sun is normally out.

I was actually looking at this waterfall - the second tallest waterfall in the U.S. or something. You can hazard other guesses in the comments.

In Soviet Russia, waterfall pee on dog! ha ha . . . oh well

Perhaps it was the tallest waterfall to ever enter a free-trade arrangement with the USSR? The nastiest waterfall this side of the Mississippi? Either way, it was quite a tall goddamn waterfall.

More interestingly though, it was right there and you could go and stand in it. I had a housemate from New Zealand at one time who complained that there's no right of public access to water in the U.S.. Apparently, in NZ you can just run right up to the water and hop in, no matter where you are. The shore is public land and if the Man wants to stop you from drowning he can go screw himself! I think it's a shame that in the U.S. we (have to?) restrict access to lovely feats of nature like this one. In this case, of course, we haven't and I should shut up.

Also, this makes me sound like a filthy libertarian, and I think libertarians should be beaten savagely. Then if the cops don't come, everybody wins.

We've launched

There's still a metric tonne of work to do, but the site's open to the public. The url is http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/.

Okay, back to work for me.

More on work hours?

Even I'm finding my constant posts about work and the hours to be tedious. I promise that this will be the last one barring major interesting events.

I was at work from 9:30 AM on Thursday to 8:30 PM or so on Friday. By my calculations that 35 hours. Evan, who was there with me the entire time, and I were synching up our two technologies that produce the numbers that run our business. He has it in Excel, and I built it in SAS, so we needed to make sure the numbers come out the same (good news, they do).

Anyway, this was the last push to find errors and discrepancies and it took a good deal longer than we hoped. Still, it was the kind of work that doesn't require a great deal of hard thinking but also isn't so dull it puts you to sleep. In other words, it was the best kind of work to do overnight.

It's been a good long while since I pulled an all-nighter, and I'm sort of surprised I was able to pull it off. Good news if I'm ever a father and need to stay up nights. I did lose about an hour during a fugue state after I went home for lunch on Friday and wasn't able to get any rest because an investor called. I put my head down for about 20 minutes and then got a call from Evan reminding me about a meeting. I rushed to the meeting and kind of woke up there. I don't have clear recollections of what I did during that hour, but afterwards I was pretty well awake for the rest of the day.

Now we just have to make sure this doesn't translate to bragging rights at work. I really don't want to work somewhere that rewards you for staying up all night and day. I'd prefer to work at a place where work is done well and smart and people are expected to have interesting extramural lives. We're getting there.