Month: November 2008

Happy Birthday Marcus

Dave

Today is my nephew, Marcus’, 13th birthday. Happy birthday Marcus from Aunt Jean, Uncle Dave and your adoring cousin Conrad!

One of my favorite stories about Marcus is when he was about 3 years old. I think it must have been the Spring, around the time of my niece’s and sister in law’s birthday. He picked up a flier from the newspaper that had a picture of a bike and brought it to my brother and sister in law and said, “Happy birthday Marcus”. In other words, “Get me this bike”.

This year, my parents got Marcus a 16 Gb chip. We asked him what he was going to do with it and he said something about video games. Given what he’s done with his PSP, I think the providers of our national communications systems should be concerned.

Local TV takes a cue from YouTube

Dave

I get a news digest email several times a day from Local Tech Wire, the biz and tech web outlet of WRAL, our CBS affiliate. The editor, Rick Smith, provides some of the best and most in-depth business coverage in our area. He and colleague Valonda Calloway did a fascinating interview with SAS CEO Jim Goodnight a few weeks ago at our annual Media Day that demonstrated how more traditional news outlets are changing in response to Web 2.0. The interview went all over the place, from SAS’ third quarter results “up more than 12 percent over last year” to Jim’s advice on investing and reflections on how his own portfolio is doing. Rather than boil it down into a few sound bites for the evening news, they put the entire video up on their web site. If it was edited, I don’t know where.

Quick! Choose one! Polar bears or Twitter?

Dave

This morning I got hit by a headline on a wire service article that snapped my head back: “Web 2.0 investments dive in Q3 but cleantech surges.” “Oh, no,” I thought. “Here we go again. The media can’t declare something on the rise without simultaneously sounding the death knell for something else.” We saw the same phenomenon a few weeks ago when Wired declared blogging dead, assassinated by Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. “At roughly the same time I resurrected my blog.”

On reading the piece I realized it’s not taking that direction at all. Venture investment in Web 2.0 startups is down, whereas investment in sustainable energy startups is going up. Still, I’m sure the headline will stick in some people’s minds: Web 2.0 is out, green is in.

I’m glad I work at a company that’s pursuing them both. Not only is our solar farm scheduled to go live in December, but we’ve also broken ground on a new office building and customer visit center that will incorporate a wide variety of green features. And we have a new product, SAS for Sustainability Management, that helps companies measure and manage their environmental impact.

As for 2.0, we have an active Marketing 2.0 Council engaged in understanding 2.0/social media initiatives and strategizing how we can use them effectively. And we’ve just hired our first Social Media Manager “me”. No one is talking about how one focus is better than the other. No one is saying, “Let’s stop all this social media nonsense and spend more time on green.” In fact, we’re talking about how social media can help us tell our corporate social responsibility story. It’s a natural fit, when you think of it, and I’ll write more about that as we go along.

One of the many things I’m learning from social media is that we have the capacity to hold many ideas, concepts and pieces of information in our brains at the same time. The multitasking we thought we mastered in the ’90s is but a pale imitation of what we’re capable of now. So we can make room for green and 2.0 at the same time, can’t we?

Dinner at Saint Jacques

Dave

The Mrs. and I went to Saint Jacques in Raleigh last night for a pre-birthday “mine” dinner with our friends Memsy and Gill. I’ve been there several times for lunch with my dad and have been trying to get there for dinner for at least a year. It’s one of the most elegant, calm and sophisticated restaurants I’ve ever visited, reminding me favorably of Pachon in Tokyo, where I celebrated my 21st birthday in what is still the benchmark meal of my life. At Pachon, the wait staff are basically ninjas. You finish your dinner roll, there is a slight shimmer in the air, and a new roll appears on your plate. Dinner for four cost about a thousand bucks, and that was in 1986.

Saint Jacques comes closer to that level of service than anywhere I’ve eaten in quite some time, certainly anywhere in North Carolina. The owner, Lil Lacassagne, is from Provence and worked for Roger Vergé at Moulin de Mougins. When I’ve described the level of service to friends, I cite one quick example: The restaurant’s napkins are white, but if you’re wearing dark clothes, they bring you a black napkin so you don’t get napkin fluff on your trousers. There’s much more, but it all flows from there.

Lil is a perfect host, friendly without being unctuous. When my dad and The Mrs and I have been there for lunch, we’ve had long conversations with him about his work in France, how he came to the US and where he gets his tomatoes. I have a very high standard of service that descends from my German restaurateur grandfather, and Lil lives up to it in a way that I very seldom find. Last night he guided wine aficionado Gill through a selection process that was a joy to behold and left them both smiling.

Here’s what I had “yoinked from the online menu”:

Crusted Scallop on a Smooth Bed
Wild caught delicious scallops, pan seared in a thin crust, served atop a julienne of soft pear and fennel braised with smoked bacon. Rich and slightly sweet, a delight of the senses

Braised Veal Pied Paquets “stuffed veal” Veal hanging tenders filled with meat and vegetable stuffing, slowly braised in red wine, served on a garlic and cheese creamy polenta finished with cippolini onions and tomato veal braising juice.

The scallop was outstanding, and I’m not a huge fan of scallops. But everything that’s great about a scallop was there, without any of the stuff about a scallop that’s not great. If you know what I mean. Fresh and reminiscent of the sea, but not fishy.

The veal dish was also very good, but a bit more like meatballs than I was expecting. Really, really great meatballs, granted, but the initial impression stuck.

I had the apple tarte tatin for dessert, and it was obviously how much time and care had gone into making it.

We enjoyed the meal very much and the price was reasonable for the level of service, attention to detail and quality of ingredients. This is a restaurant to visit for the complete experience, rather than for cutting-edge gastronomy.

My name is David B. Thomas

Dave

dbt-thumbnail-blacked-outFor most of my adult life, I’ve used David B. Thomas as my name. My father is David Thomas, without a middle name, so for one thing it helped distinguish us. “He was David NMI Thomas in the Army, for “No Middle Initial.”” Using my middle initial felt a bit stilted at times, because I introduce myself as Dave Thomas, and that’s generally how people refer to me.

Online I was usually dbt001, because with a name like mine, it’s hard to get an email address or username other than something like DavidBThomas3369.

When I started working at SAS in May of 2007, I arrived to find a nameplate on my door reading “Dave Thomas” and an email address to match. What the heck, I thought. I’ll just go with that.

Then I heard John T. Mims speak at the Ragan Communications Web 2.0 conference held on campus at SAS. One of John’s tips for participating in social media was to build your name as your brand. People with a common name need to do something to stand out in Web searches, John suggested. That’s why he started using his middle initial.

That got me thinking. If you search for “Dave Thomas,” you’re going to get an awful lot of search results, almost all of them not me, and many about the late hamburger pitchman. “People still insist on reminding me we share a name – I know, thanks”. If you Google “David B. Thomas,” you’ll still find a lot of people, but you’ll also find me – three times on the first page of results. So now I’ve started using my B again. Where possible, on Twitter for instance, I’ve changed my username from dbt001 to DavidBThomas. It was either that, or change my name to Marmalade P. Vestibule.

When I first started blogging in 2003, along with a small cadre of friends, we all sought to be anonymous on the Web. It just seemed like the thing to do. My blogroll included Adda, Rebecky, Mykull and Pinky. You would need to scour their sites with the acuity of a Federal corruption investigator to figure out what town we even lived in. What were we worried about, exactly?

Five years later, not only am I writing a post about my name, but I’m on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Orkut “I think”, Flickr and Friendfeed. If you want, you can find out what’s in my Netflix queue. I take care not to post anything potentially controversial or damaging to any of those outlets, but I don’t really do anything potentially controversial or damaging these days, publicly or privately.

Things have gone so far in the opposite direction that we’re now seeing public service announcements aimed at teenagers reminding them that anything they post online lives forever. As for my generation “X” social media seems to be teaching us it’s okay to be online and open and honest about your life and who you are. That knowledge is seeping through to the companies we work for. I’m still holding my breath for the first big “social media crisis” I may have to face. But maybe by the time it happens, I’ll be able to spend my time addressing it rather than defending our participation in those channels.

What’s the opposite of anonymity? Nymity?

Sometimes going part way is worse than not going at all

Dave

The Mrs. and I just got back from a walk in our neighborhood. On the ground near every mailbox was a CD-ROM in a plastic bag. “I assume they were lying on the ground because you can’t legally put things in a mailbox unless you work for the USPS.” Turns out it’s the 2008-2009 UNC-Chapel Hill campus directory. I assume from my limited sample they’ve given them to every postal address in Chapel Hill.

It’s definitely a step in the right direction over the paper phone book-style directories they used to print and distribute the same way. But I couldn’t help wondering why they don’t just eliminate the distribution step and rely on their web directory? If they’ve already decided to forsake non-computer users, how much more of an incremental step is it to assume that people with computers – especially in this town – have Internet access?

I’ve struggled with a similar question at various previous companies; When do you stop printing your collateral and just rely on your Web site and other electronic resources? The answer, so far, has always come down to the same thing: The sales folks like to be able to put something tangible in customers’ hands.

Besides, if you don’t have a company magazine, what will you leave lying on tables in your waiting areas? Laptops?

Actually, why not?