A nice way to kick off the long weekend

It's great to see the media's enthusiasm about the Firefox 3 Beta 2! The features and improvements that are being noticed reflect the hard work of our amazing development community.

For your reading pleasure, here are some choice quotes from the coverage from Beta 2:

“Christmas is here a bit early for Firefox fans. Mozilla has just released the second beta for Firefox 3 with some 900 bug fixes and improvements over the previous version, including some new features, user interface enhancements and more.” -- Scott Gilbertson, WIRED

“Overall, it's another very impressive release that reflects the rapidly-growing robustness of Firefox 3.” -- Ryan Paul, Ars Technica

“Firefox 3.0 looks pretty much the same as it did before. So the changes are subtle, then when you find them, they become profound.” -- Scott M. Fullton III, BetaNews

“The Firefox design team has obviously put a lot of thought into helping users remember and find the pages that they want to visit.” -- Stan Beer, iTWire

“Well, whatever the interface evolves into, I have no complaints about Firefox 3 Beta 2. Anyone who is still using Internet Explorer - whatever version - really needs to take a look at this even though it's still only meant for reviewers. However, it would be nice if Mozilla remembered to also cater to its most loyal fan base - Linux users.” -- Stan Beer, iTWire

Ken Kovash Day Declared

Ken Kovash Day Declared

Millions of KoKo fans cheer

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. - December 19, 2007 - Today has officially been named Ken Kovash Day. This day honors the most statistically significant man in recent memory. In its first year, KoKo (also sometimes called KeKo) fans plan to make Ken Kovash Day an annual event.

"At first I though Ken was actually a gorilla, because I kept hearing how 'Koko' would do some acquisition funnel analysis for our department meeting. It was confusing, because I wasn't sure gorillas were that advanced with marketing analytics yet."
said, David Rolnitzky. "Now I know, that there are few beasts or people who could do the type of top-notch analysis that Ken provides."

"Simply put, I'm crazy for Koko," said Mary Colvig.

"I'm such a fan of Ken's that just to feel smart, I've started calling myself the denominator," said Alex Polvi. "As the denominator, I hope I can rise to brilliance that is the Numerator."

Kovash, aka the Numerator at Mozilla, began his career at Boomerang, followed by a brief stint at Yahoo. He also worked as a Research Associate at Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory. In 2006, Kovash graduated with an MBA from University of Chicago. He has an undergraduate degree in Economics from UC Berkeley.

Pro-SID

This month at work, the men in the office have been observing a little thing they're calling NSID (no shaving in december).

Found this article today and thought it was worth sharing.

i <3 dc

scanning the washington post home page this morning.
can't help it.
after almost a decade and 3000 miles between us, the washpost is still my home page.

ran across this headline today:
D.C. Has Weekend Free of Shootings

in most other cities, if there *is* a shooting, that's the news.
not the absence of shootings.

planes overhead

Right now, there are about 10 or so planes circling San Francisco in non-airport flight patterns and at a variety of heights. It's not Blue Angels. SF has been de-militarized for as long as I've lived here.

I used to live in DC where planes, helicopters, shock trauma airlifts, ambulances, presidential motor brigades, foreign dignitary police escorts, navy blue modified chevy tahoes and metrobus re-routing were almost daily occurrences.

I ran out to the deck like a little kid to investigate what sounded like thunder and found twinkling lights overhead. Then momentarily worried that we were at war and that nobody bothered to tell San Francisco.

If you live here, you understand that it's entirely possible.

Off to bed.

musings on gay marriage

i've been thinking a lot about weddings lately. almost non-stop. it's terrifying to spend the bulk of your life as a tomboy and then suddenly find yourself enthralled with bridal magazines, wedding dress shopping and gift registries. very strange.

ash and i are getting married next summer. it seems like a long way off. i've observed that this is a coastal thing. if you're eight months out on the west coast, you've got forever. if you're eight months out on the east coast, you best get your ass in gear and start planning!

so, the more i've been thinking about the prospect of spending the rest of my life with someone i can't imagine spending my life without...the more i've been thinking about the segment of the population who are unable to marry. particularly in san francisco, where gay is part of the fabric of our city and pride is a city-wide celebration, it's hard to imagine that people spending their lives together are unable to call it marriage. there's a whole language to dance around the concept. partner. significant other. companion. domestic partner. roommate. bleh.

a couple of years ago, gavin newsom effectively legalized gay marriage within san francisco. couples from around the country came to sf's city hall to get married. the rest of the country had a fit. it's largely cited as the reason bush got elected to a second term.

without making any judgement about the sanctity of marriage from a religious perspective, it's hard to see why from a purely civic perspective, marriage for anyone who wants it wouldn't be an option. if straight people can get married in vegas on a whim and have it annulled once the booze wears off, how come gay people can't get married?

i'm looking toward this august, feeling amazingly lucky to have found my besheret. i hope that we get to a point where everyone can experience this feeling - regardless of whom they've decided to love for the rest of their lives.

New music

Lately, I've been listening to the following artists a bunch. Found all this new music goodness on Hype Machine.

Elvis Perkins
Cassettes Won't Listen
Adele
Akron/Family
Cold War Kids
Man Man

"Moderate" quake

The USGS labeled this one "moderate" but it's the strongest earthquake I've felt in more than 6 years of living here. House shook, everything rattled and I bolted for a door frame. Ash was sleeping - he's still on Taiwanese time. Not sure if the house shaking woke him up or if it was my screaming. I'm not a very good Californian. Every time there's an earthquake I get a big rush of adrenaline. When they're over, I'm not sure what to do other than click refresh on usgs.gov until they post the magnitude.



For those who are interested, tonight's was a 5.6, quickly followed by a 1.4, 1.5 and 1.6.

Release of Mozilla and Firefox messaging docs

Today, John Slater and I posted some messaging documents to Spreadfirefox.

One of the documents helps to explain Mozilla: who we are, what we do, why we're here, etc. The other document evangelizes the benefits of using Firefox. Our hope is that people will use the docs and then share feedback about what resonated, what didn't and how we can tweak them for future use.

These are not final documents. They are meant to be a living, breathing reflection of our community. We plan to release subsequent revisions based on community feedback. If you use them, we'd love to hear from you about your experience.

Psychic Graffiti

Came home to graffiti on my house for the first time since we moved. On our white garage door someone wrote "My friends all got lazy" in black sharpie and decorated it with a little scroll. I'd post a picture but my digicam is in Korea at the moment. I'm curious to see how long it stays up there. It's not terrible looking and it's sort of a funny sentiment.

Maybe I've been living in cities for too long but I've developed a fondness for the graffiti. The Mission is covered in these amazing, colorful murals but those aren't really graffiti since they're put up by an organization called Precita Eyes.

At the old house, graffiti was our neighborhood barometer. It was as accurate as any newsletter. When the gangs were active, new tags would show up overnight - rivals would cross out each other's tags and then they'd write their own higher up the wall. This wasn't pretty graffiti but it was very informative.

Sometimes I think the graffiti I read was put there just for me. Like secret messages in the fortune cookie of life. One time, I saw "And the truly beautiful people never worry about their fingernails." I love that one.

Visiting hours with the non-tech world

Just spent a couple of days at home with my family. It’s always refreshing to spend a few days away from Silicon Valley in order to see how people live when they’re not obsessed with technology. My family lives near DC, so they are pretty obsessed with pundits and the ‘08 presidential race.

Anyway, I was at my sister and brother-in-law’s house and I asked to borrow a computer. It’s hard being away from the internet for several hours a day with no way to check in and see what’s going on in my online world (email, news, chat, facebook, etc). To my utter shock and dismay, my brother-in-law hands me a laptop and there’s no Firefox logo to be found anywhere on the desktop. As if that weren’t bad enough, I grudgingly click the little blue e in order to see what they’re running and it’s IE6! Argh!

I take a deep breath and explain that although I would prefer that my family use Firefox because that’s what I spend all day trying to convince the rest of the world to do, I don’t mind if they keep a current version of IE running on their machine just in case they can’t resist the urge to click the blue e. But to have IE6 on their home machines is unacceptable, especially with a sibling who works at Mozilla!

So, I used this as an opportunity to flex my Mozilla community member muscles and downloaded Firefox on all of their home computers and then installed Adblock Plus, and showed my sister how to navigate add-ons in case there were others she wanted to install. I tried to install IE7 as well, so that they would have added protection, but I couldn’t get the download window to come up. I kept getting an explorer.exe error. Strange.

My brother-in-law was playing around on the laptop for a bit and before I left, I asked him what he thought of Firefox. He said, “I always thought I had a slow computer. Turns out I had a slow browser.”

I understand that not everyone lives and breathes technology the way we do in the Bay Area. As an organization, we’re working hard to figure out how to reach the folks who don’t even know that just because software fulfills the minimal needs to be functional, doesn’t mean there isn’t something better out there.

Misdirected email...

I got the following email yesterday. Talk about barking up the wrong tree...

< snip >
Hi Melissa,

I would love to speak with you about job opportunities at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide. We currently have Technology PR openings at various levels on several of our Microsoft account teams.

< /snip >

I've been doing PR for open source projects and companies for the past 2 years or so. A bunch of enterprise, proprietary stuff before that. I don't want to say I'm religious about open source. I feel like that's such a loaded term. However, I have internalized a number of open source values and they are directly at odds with how MSFT approaches PR.

In open source PR:
1) If it seems unclear, shine some light on it
2) If it needs an embargo, it's probably because you're working with a partner and your regular reporters will sense something fishy and will start digging to determine identity of said partner
3) You can't control the blogosphere so you may as well make friends with and go out drinking with the blogosphere.
4) If you don't move serious money, you have to find creative ways to explain why you matter to the publications covering serious money.
5) Respect the individual voice. There's so much of the same out there. Embrace the things that are different.
6) The threshold for voicing an opinion is caring enough to have an opinion.
7) You're in a fishbowl so if you screw up, there are a lot of people who will let you know.
8) You have to know when to betray deeply ingrained industry practices and when to stick with what's working. This is a lot less obvious than it might seem.

These are just a few...there are tons more. This post is by no means complete, just some thoughts that were bouncing around my head today...

ugh

12.5 hours is a stupid time difference. wtf is up with the .5?

Long distance love in the age of blogging

My best friend is in Bangalore or BLR as he's been writing it lately. It's been less than a week and we've been talking a bunch - sometimes more than we do when we're in the same city.

The technology has drastically changed since my college boyfriend moved to Japan just under a decade ago. Back in the old days, int'l phone calls were very expensive. Skype didn't exist and eyeball cams were really rare, let alone built-in cameras like the ones on the Macs. I've been using my computer to broadcast the living room via Skype and Y! messenger. I saw the inside of the Singapore airport from Ash's computer. I showed off my new haircut today using Skype.

The world is getting smaller and smaller.

From the "Why is this News?" file

CNET has an article up this morning about a former MSFT employee's blog post stating that he's considering the switch to LinuxMCE to avoid DRM issues with Windows Media Player.

Why is this news?

If I write a blog post saying that I'm considering eating an apple for breakfast instead of my usual banana, will CNET cover that?

Sometimes the right-click journalism thing goes a little too far. For this hard-hitting investigative bit of reporting, the journalist read a blog post and then wrote a story that recapped the blog post. That's metablogging. That's not reporting. Just wanted to clarify.

Geeky girlz

So, a few months ago I found out about a cool conference going on right here in Mountain View, CA - really close to the Mozilla offices. It's called She's Geeky: A Women's Tech (un)conference.

I've been working at Mozilla for almost 6 months now. I often get asked about what it's like to be a woman in a largely male office. It's actually quite funny. I started my career working in the IT department, wearing jeans to work and crawling under desks to sort out cables. Then I started working in a PR firm and started wearing skirts and suits and calling the IT guy whenever things broke. Now I wear jeans, crawl under my desk and still manage to bug the IT guy a fair amount.

Anyway, I think this should be an interesting event and look forward to connecting with other women in open source.

She's Geeky: A Women's Tech (un)Conference
October 22-23 in Mountain View, CA
http://www.shesgeeky.org

Happy birthday to my blog

It's been a year since I started this blog. Today, I officially got syndicated via planet.mozilla.org. I've been using this blog largely for personal musings so when I decided to start blogging for work, I wondered if I should start an entirely new blog. I decided not to. So now, presumably, there are people beyond my friends and family who are checking out my blog.

Hello world.

MSFT PR uses Firefox

My PR team sent me this article today.

Interestingly enough, there are several shortcuts available for PR professionals using Firefox (both built-in and via add-ons). For PR pro's using Firefox as your primary browser, which features and/or add-ons are you using on a regular basis?

belated blogging

haven't been in one place for long enough to blog in some time. figured i better get something up before my blog dies from lack of content oxygen. it's been quite a few weeks.

travel went something like sf>portugal>spain>france>uk>oregon>nevada>sf. i have some blog notes from my europe trip that i never managed to post while i was traveling. i'll try to get caught up soon.

it's good to be home. really good. sf is such a nice place to call home. of the places i traveled over the past few weeks, there isn't one that compares to san francisco.

there's no place like home...

temptation

they are running dunkin donuts coffee commercials in SF lately. the ads show delicious iced coffee in extreme closeup. the nearest dd is at least hundreds of miles away. why do you torment me dd? why?

in other dunkin news...i was in boston for work last week. i ordered a dd coffee sweet and light. i think this has changed from the sweet and light of my youth. my mouth puckered at the sweet, sweet, sweet taste. still, dd coffee holds a special spot in my heart and always will. when i was 16 and too young to get into bars, dd was the cool spot to hang out at 3 am. here's to you dd. love you forever.

Oh, media. Oh, bother. Oh, brother.

Most people only recognize PR in its overt forms. By and large, overt PR isn't that challenging to do.

Again, this is where blogging gets difficult for someone in PR. Because the vast majority of people can't imagine what you do on any given day. My parents sort of understand that I work with press. Ash's cousin in Hawaii had heard of Trolltech's Greenphone, but when I tried to explain my direct involvement with them having heard of a Norwegian company's innovations in mobile Linux, things began to get decidedly hazy.

So it was, that I was at my new job and a coworker asked me for my thoughts on an upcoming announcement. I talked a bit about approach and his response was, "Surely you don't think a couple of articles can do all that." On the first day of LinuxWorld last year, a single article in LinuxDevices.com about Trolltech's Greenphone was the number one hit on both slashdot and digg. The /. article had more than 700 comments within hours.

Reporters and analyst friends found me on the show floor to congratulate me on the reception to the news and to thank me for my hand in coordinating interviews. How often do the Mike Arrington's of the world thank a PR person for pushing them to write the story that ultimately turns out to be the one that defines their career? More often than not, they're writing pieces that emphasize how "above the influence of PR" they all are. I'm sorry to blow your cover guys, but you're not above the influence of PR. Especially really good PR. Really exceptional PR, the most effective kind, you don't even feel the sway.

Fred Vogelstein of Wired has been kvetching that he got sold a bill of goods from Microsoft's PR machine. While Fred may feign naivete to the delight of his readers who feel that they are getting a sneak peak into his genuine ire at the craftiness of MSFT - and here's the news flash folks - um, that's a version of PR. Wired and Conde Nast had on their hands a story about a seasoned tech reporter who took a story straight from MSFT without so much as reading the wikipedia entry on the topic to see if the party line checked out. Fred got duped, but was it because MSFT was so crafty? Or was it because Fred didn't do any research? MSFT spun Fred and Fred is spinning his readers.

I had lunch with some editors at Wired on the day the stories hit. We ate lunch and they boasted about how clever Fred was for putting it all out there. But in PR, there's more happening behind the scenes than that. Fred and his editors sell magazines and advertising. A sensational story like the one they spun was sure to generate more interest in the issue already on the topic of "radical transparency" - so this is the point where most non-PR people think you start sounding like a conspiracy nut. But after a number of years in PR, I'm just a realist.

This is why it's difficult to do great PR. You have to relinquish credit. Remember that scene from Wag the Dog? It's not about pointing to a single article and saying, I made that happen. It's about pointing to entire movements or industries and not saying, I made that happen because that destroys the illusion. The whole thing is simultaneously fascinating and also tremendously unsettling.

new job, new commute

i biked to work yesterday from the mt view caltrain station. i was pleasantly surprised that the bike lanes were clearly marked and that the route was pretty accessible. i have been trying a new route to get to work everyday. today was day three.

ash and i carpooled on monday which probably works out the best since we can use the hov lanes that way. on tuesday, i biked. on wednesday, i took bart, caltrain and then the shoreline shuttle which seems like a lot but was actually not bad.

my goal is to try out the commute for a month and determine if i can do it without a car.

Take the lane...on biking in SF

I was biking to work this morning, as I do almost every morning and I went to "take the lane" on my way down 9th St which I do pretty much every morning. I was thinking about the expression. It essentially means that I ride in traffic as though my 15 lb bike frame is an 2 ton SUV and I take the entire lane instead of staying to either the right or left side of traffic.

Before I started riding, I would see bikers do this in the city and I always thought it was kind of annoying because there's no easy way to get around them. But when you're biking, it makes a ton of sense. You take the lane when there's no visible bike lane so that you don't get accidentally crunched in traffic. It's the choice between being visible and making a nuisance of yourself for a block or not being seen and risking certain death on the pothole infested streets of Frisco.

I've now been riding for a year and a half and it's amazing how much fear I've conquered in that time. When I was 9, I was riding down a big hill and took a sharp left turn. My bike fell out from under me and I proceeded to skid from one side of the street to the other on my knees. I actually still have some gravel spots in my knee and a pretty gnarly scar from this.

When I started riding in SF, it was my first endeavor into urban biking. I hadn't really biked regularly since before I got a driver's permit. I was completely terrified for my first month of riding. I got a membership to the SFBC (San Francisco Bicycle Coalition) and they sent me a map of bike routes in the city. This helped immensely. Designated bike lanes were definitely useful.

There's a lot of tension in this city between cabs and bikers, drivers and bikers, pedestrians and bikers, Muni and bikers, and bikers and other bikers. I've almost been hit by cars, buses and skateboarders while biking in the city (I'm lucky my Jewish mother doesn't read my blog). When you're driving a car, everything in your way is an obstacle. When you're on a bike, everything in your way is an opportunity to improve your riding skills.

stuck in boston on st paddy's day

when i was younger i always thought that the opportunity to travel for business was really cool. my dad used to say "same conference room, different city." i romanticized the idea of getting to see the world, stay at chic hotels, eat great food and all on the company dime.

when my client asked me to travel to the boston area for 2 days, i was fine with taking the trip. i was only expecting to be on the ground for 36 hours and then would turn right around and head back to my 70 degree weather in san francisco. somehow, this is not what happened.

i ended up renting a car from alamo - something i'd never do again. they didn't have anything with 4 wheel drive so i couldn't upgrade to a vehicle that could handle the predicted snow storm. my very smart client got an suv.

on friday morning, the flurries started. how novel. how exciting. how pretty. i haven't seen snow in about four years. what a treat. then the snow got heavier. and the flakes got bigger. by the time i left my morning meeting and began the drive to my afternoon meeting, the snow had begun to stick to the ground. when i left my afternoon meeting, my flight was still listed as "on time" and so i braved the scary driving conditions and made my way to logan. by the time i approached the airport, i literally couldn't see 20 feet in front of me. it was a white out.

i dropped off my rental car and made my way to the airport where i was told that i was booked on the last flight to o'hare out of logan. how lucky was i?! after several delays, they finally canceled 90% of flights out of logan, mine included. the next flight out that i was able to book gets me back to sf at 11pm tonight. i have a full day to kill in boston and it just so happens to be st. patrick's day.

the city is overrun with college students dressed in green who started drinking at 10am. good times. i'm about to grab some lunch across the street and i'll probably order myself a pint. i'm hopeful that my flight out tonight will be on time.

so much for the joys of business travel. :D

it's the economy, stoopid

in the past week:

a sleeping hipster
a smoking laundry patron
an empty corona bottle
a child's plastic toy

it's been busy lately so i haven't had much time to keep up with writing. found a new place that doesn't even have a stoop. not sure what i'll blog about at that point. if i'm stoop-less, i don't have a pavlovian reminder to sign on and keep this thing updated.

stoop

yesterday - a yellow bottle cap on Monday morning.

someone (ok, it was ash) once wrote to me - "don't let the stirrings of your heart make you dizzy"
sometimes (ok, lately) i feel like my heart is going to explode
things are a'brewin.
it's in the air lately.

More weird things on my stoop

Yesterday I found a broken desk lamp left on my stoop that looked a lot like one I have in my bedroom. However, the bedroom one is still intact. And I was so close to having a matching set.

On Saturday morning, I found an empty can of sardines on my stoop. EWWWW! Who eats sardines? And why is it so hard to throw away the can when you're done with them?! Seriously, there's a garbage can within sight from my front door.

My stoop is not a trash can.

technorati tags

Technorati Profile

reminiscing on 9/11

Seems like a strange thing to be thinking about in the middle of February of 2007, but I wanted to capture these emotions and thought I might blog about them. Particularly in the run up to the 2008 elections, as we begin to have daily reminders that we live in a "post 9/11" world, I thought it important to reflect a bit, take stock on emotions...

I overslept on the morning of 9/11. I woke up to my best friend calling my cell phone. I hit ignore because I realized I was late for work. Really late. It was about 8:45am Pacific. I threw on some clothes and ran out the door to catch the bus. I called my office and spoke to the receptionist who told me that there had been an attack on NYC and that the World Trade Center was bombed. I had to ask 3 times if she was joking and she told me to get to a TV. I ran into a corner store where they had the TV playing and saw the awful news. In a state of shock, I proceeded to go into work because I didn't know what else to do.

My family was directly impacted by 9/11 - my sister and brother-in-law were living 2 blocks away from Tower 2 and my brother-in-law was working within a block for Tower 1. My family is a New York family. My dad's family and my mom's family are both from Brooklyn and then later Long Island. My grandmother was still living in LI and several aunts, uncles, and cousins were living in the greater NY area in September of 2001.

I had just moved to San Francisco and hadn't changed over my DC cell number yet. By the time I found out the news, the towers had already fallen. The Pentagon was already smoking. And by that time, all phones from DC to NY weren't working. I remember calling and calling and calling to see if my family was ok. My mother was on a train headed to NYC that morning. My brother-in-law and sister were within blocks for the WTC when the planes hit. At 11:23am PT, I finally got an email from my father that said the following...

>Subject: New update
>Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 11:23:59 -0400
>
>Adam is OK. Just a little dusty.
>Mom is stuck in the city (Penn Station was closed).
>I have not gotten to your grandmother.

My mother has Lupus and was stuck all day in the lobby of the Hotel Pennsylvania. Strangers made her a place so that she could lie down. I think they found her a table. My brother-in-law hiked about 100 blocks from lower Manhattan to his father's office uptown. By the time he got there, he was covered in the soot that was covering the city like snow. My work sent me home. I went home and watched the horrible scenes on TV. Waiting for someone to call or for the phone lines to open up.

I got the following email from my father the next day:

>Spoke to mom. Trying to get her to take your grandmother to the beach.
>Rachel is at work. David has no class (we know that). I worked out this AM
>and came in a bit later.
>
>You should consider doing the following:
>1) Take a walk
>2) Listen to a Phish tape
>3) Give blood
>4) Find a minyan for mincha/mariv.

A few hours later, I got this one:

>Subject: Re: New update
>Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 13:13:40 -0400
>
>Speaking to mom in new york as I am typing this. She sends love and wants
>me to tell you that two carrier pigeons are being sent to pick you up for
>Tgiving.
>
>Don't forget the therapeutic benefit of a good walk.
>I will calm her down.
>
>Love,
>Dad

These three emails still have the power to make tears well up in my eyes. It's the rawest of emotions. The panic. The feeling of complete lack of control. Of being 21 years old and moving across the country with the idea that home was no more than a plane ride away. And then having the idea of a plane ride change overnight from something easy to something horrifying.

My sister and brother-in-law never got home. It took a full eight months before they were permitted back into their apartment and even then it required a police escort. But at least they came home. Many didn't. I cried the first time I flew back to New York. Tears streamed down my face as the flight attendants got on the speaker and said "And if New York is home for you, welcome home." New York has been my second home since my first visit when I was three weeks old. I remember in the months after 9/11 that people applauded after successful flights. I still remember this every time I fly and I fly often. That once, as a nation, we clapped our hands in gratitude after successfully landing.

boston and other rogue nations

i love adult swim.

how is it possible to mistake a mooninite for a bomb? they don't even look alike.

fucking massholes. get a sense of humor.

musings on miami...

musing 1:
old jewish grandmothers have been sporting bling since before gangsta rappers were in diapers

musing 2:
60 degrees in florida is really freakin cold

musing 3:
red lights mean go
sirens mean keep on driving
stop signs mean nothing at all

musing 4:
all women in miami, no matter how young or old, sound exactly like fran drescher

musing 5:
there's nothing like half a corned beef sandwich and some matzo ball soup to make you really homesick for the east coast

musing 6:
if it's not exactly how you like it, send it back

tails, very long tails...

Just got home from dinner/book club with Wired Mag/Long Tail writer, Chris Anderson. Really interesting stuff. There's an ongoing discussion in PR about what to do now that the traditional MSM folks are going away and leaving the journalism to the rest of us.

Seemingly overnight, traditional media has started to blog, has a new audience, a similar style and has moved on with their lives. But these are the people who always had a mouthpiece. It may have been censored or limited, but they had an audience and a way to reach them. Disgruntled masses now have a place to voice frustration. But I think it's only taught us that all customer call centers suck, whether they're in India or Iowa and that no corporation ever really cares if your satisfied until you threaten to switch to a competitor.

< rant> Dish Network and Sprint PCS are always tied in my book for worst customer service ever. Seriously, if you want to be abused, give them a call. They are always happy to steal an hour from your life only to tell you that they can't help you anyway. < /rant>

So, I am in this very weird segment of the population. I work in PR. That automatically feels weird when you set out to blog. I have intimate knowledge about a number of different types of technology, a solid understanding of media and a good feel for how to make cool things bubble up to the surface. But blogging has felt weird and awkward. It's part of the reason I resisted blogging for a long time.

I feel like I'm paid to have a bias. That my work meant that my opinions and thoughts were less valid. Lately, more and more, I feel like I'm precisely who should be blogging. I am passionate. I think the best PR people are. If you don't have passion for your work, how are you ever going to convince anyone else that your product, company or idea is interesting/cool/game-changing/the greatest thing since sliced bread?

I do PR even when I'm not paid to. I actually do my best work when I'm off the clock. That's the thing. Cool shit is cool shit. No two ways about it.

Weird things on my stoop

So, I've decided to start blogging about the weird things I find on my front stoop on a daily basis. I live in a neighborhood that seems to attract crazy people and weirdassshit and my stoop has a magnetic pull for all of it.

Tonight, I came home from work to find that an obviously high homeless person had attached a kitten on a leash to my front door. No seriously. I'm not joking. A tiny black kitten on a leash was attached to my front door. So I ask the guy, "Scuse me. Is this your cat?" and he says, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just put it there while I'm doing my laundry next door." This is complete and total bullshit because this guy is obviously not doing laundry but whatever. I have begun to think that the laundry mat is just a front for the drug running that goes on in the area.

Other things I have found on my stoop before I decided to start blogging about them on a daily basis:
one homeless man who curled himself into a ball and tried to tuck himself under my bedroom window on a rainy night, random packages of cheeze doodles, leftover parts of burritos, meth addicts scoring a fix, day laborers drinking beers, obnoxious hipsters smoking cigarettes, obnoxious hipsters screaming at the top of their lungs at 3am, a group of 12 or so teenagers wearing gang colors and smoking blunts in full view of the THREE cameras that are on my corner. I politely suggested that they smoke their blunts away from the cameras and they thanked me.

So, I'll try to keep this going as long as I can. I promise that there's no shortage of weirdassshit going on in front of my house.