Year: 2008

Don’t pay the ransom. I’ve escaped!

Dave

Okay, I’ve been a bad, bad blogger. Between one, two or three members of the household having a cold for the last month, adjusting to the new day care “or as we call it, baby school” routine, some travel, some birthday activities and getting ready to transition to a new job within SAS “starting Dec. 1 I will become SAS’ first-ever social media manager”, there hasn’t been a lot of time or energy for baby blogging. Which is a damn shame because the boy is cuter than ever, and doing all kinds of stuff like pulling up and cruising and feeding himself hippie Cheerios substitutes and babbling and pointing at things and going “Hoohoo!” when he’s proud of some recent accomplishment. I have captured almost all of that in photos and some of it in video, and I promise I will upload as much as possible in the next week.

In the meantime, I offer you a photo Bonnie shot of Conrad at our neighborhood park, which may be the best photo ever. Of anyone. By anyone. Of all time.

That’s our happy boy.

Shouldn’t spammers be getting better, not worse?

Dave

The text of two spam emails I received this morning, blocked by my Outlook filter:

Good Afternoon

 

My name is Tammy, I live in Florida and I make handmade jewelry. I would like to know if you would have a possible interest in seeing my items on my website?

 

Thank you in advance.

 

Sincerely,

 

Tammy

And this one, which is at least concise:

 

open attachment file read and reply my letter business proposal from abdulla khouri

Caffeine + information overload = insomnia

Dave

I never have trouble sleeping. The last time I remember having any real trouble getting to sleep was seven or eight years ago the night my house was robbed. Oh, and ten years or so ago when I decided to start drinking coffee. After a few weeks I was having rapid heartbeat and withdrawal headaches and insomnia and realized I had gotten to my mid-30s without developing a caffeine addiction and that was no time to start. But today I had a big cup of regular coffee with an espresso shot and now, more than 12 hours later, I can’t sleep.

I’m getting a similar feeling from Twitter these days. I love the concept. I love the immediacy. I love being able to see what people are doing and reading and recommending in such a short format. As a writer I find it a fascinating exercise in brevity and craft. But come on, how do you keep up with it? I just added half a dozen people in the last couple of days, for a total of 60 people I’m following, and I already feel overwhelmed. Guy Kawasaki alone sent 54 tweets in the last 23 hours. With an inbox holding 2,000+ emails that need to be read, deleted or filed, I get enough of that feeling from my Web 1.0 channels.

I just downloaded TweetDeck in the vague hope it would provide some relief, but while a nice interface, it doesn’t really address the problem of having enough time to read it all. I’ve starred quite a few tweets that contain links to articles I want to read later, but now I have a backlog of tweets to follow up on. Did I mention I have 2,000 emails in my inbox? How about the number of unread items in my Google Reader? I don’t need another firehose.

Is Twitter really a positive development in communication? Or will we start seeing articles in the next couple of years by people describing how they’ve increased their productivity by, as impossible as it sounds, turning off Twitter. “At first it was hard, and my colleagues had difficulty adjusting, but now I realize I’m getting more done.”

Hello, Internet! Are you ready to rock?

Dave

WordPress just offered me the opportunity to own my own domain and “make this blog davebtommylive.com for just $15 a year.” Thanks, but I think I’ll stick with dbthomas.com and dbthomas.net.

Does that mean that even davebtommy.com is taken?

I’m pretty sure that when I bought my first domain, plooble.com, I paid $150 for it. I came home late one Saturday night and had an email from Mindspring offering to sell me my own domain. How could I pass that up? I don’t remember what I paid for domain #2, dbthomas.net. Dbthomas.com was taken at the time but a few years later a domain broker sent me an email telling me it had become available and offering to sell it to me for 30 bucks. I went to GoDaddy and got it for $8.95.

Amazing now that $150 ever seemed a reasonable price for a domain. I’m glad I got the ones I did when I did. Or else maybe www.davebtommylive.com would sound like a bargain.

Although I am going to start introducing myself as Dave B. Tommy, Live.

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.