I Think Like an Old Person

The older gentleman looked at me and said, "You think like me. You think like an old person."

As I sat, sharing a table with two older couples at the LS Oktoberfest last night, we spoke of many things as the sun set behind the carnival's "Ring of Fire" ride.

It didn't dawn on me until later in the evening, but the statement that he made about me is very fundamental to who I am. On one hand, "thinking like an old person" means that I'm fiscally conservative. We were specifically discussing how ludicrous it is that rookie professional players get guaranteed millions whether they ever play a single down of professional football in their lives.

On the other hand, I believe that "thinking like an old person" is core to belief that we must be patient, we must understand the importance of earning/learning and we must be responsible for our actions.

One of my greatest fears in the evolution of our culture right now is the lost concept of earning. Each day it is more evident that instant gratification is killing the concept of earning. If you want something you simply go get it. You don't earn it. Credit card companies will give anyone a card and will raise your limit twice per year. They are contributing to the death of earning. There is no reason to be patient anymore.

I remember having to wait for a song on the radio and quickly pressing play and record.

Although the time is NOW for action whenever I write as a marketer, consumers need to understand the consequences and be responsible for them. It pains me to agree with a plan that helps to bail out bad business decisions, but I believe that we do need to help some of our fellow Americans to keep their homes.

My older friend has advice for all of us, "Stop betting on the come." In other words, stop putting so much into unproven potential and risky practice.

In closing, I said that I just need to find a woman who also "thinks like an old person" and he said he had one for me, but his daughter had just gotten married. Darn it!

RSS Feeds, The Conversation Continues

From Andy Sernovitz's "Damn, I Wish I'd Thought of That" blog and to continue the post that I wrote last week about RSS Feeds:

Why are RSS Feeds so complicated?

Those of us in the social media business have done an awful job explaining them. We make it worse with a mishmash of terms for the exact same thing (RSS, XML, syndicate.) I think we should set an industry standard to just call them "feeds" and drop all the other terms, and use this symbol:

I had an really painful flight recently listening to a software engineer try to explain them to very nice, patient, and interested couple for 2 hours. (It didn't help he was trying to show them how it worked on his computer that was offline because we were on a plane. Grrr.)

The next day my dad asked me about them.

Here's my attempt at a clear answer to: "What are RSS Feeds?"

1. Many web sites publish updates whenever they have a new post or story. This is the "feed."
2. You can use a program called a "feed reader" to automatically collect all those stories so you can read them in one place. Think of it as an inbox for news.
3. It's quite handy--all your favorite stories come to you, instead of you having to go check a bunch of sites all the time looking for new stories. When there's something new, it shows up in your reader automatically.
4. There are also feeds for things like eBay searches or Craigslist posts. You could have your feed reader automatically track any new eBay listing for a particular item you are looking for.
5. You know if a web page has a feed if you see this icon: . It might also be near the top of your browser.
6. If you see these terms, they are all the same thing: RSS, XML, Syndicate This Site.

To get started:

1. Get a feed reader. My favorite is the free Google Reader. http://reader.google.com/
2. When you see the icon, click it to subscribe.
3. Start reading.

THANKS ANDY!

CHIEFS 4th Best Pass Defense in the League!

There is a reason why I don't listen to political ads on television. In fact, I rarely listen to what a politician has to say unless s/he is talking about what s/he wants to do or what s/he believes in. The reason is that you just can't possibly believe that you are getting the entire context of a situation about someone else when you are only hearing part of the story.

I'm going to boil this down for everyone here in the mid-west into terms that they can easily understand.

I heard on the radio today, "The CHIEFS have the 4th best passing defense in the league!" This is a true statement because they only give up an average of 153 yards per game through the air. That ranks behind Baltimore (92), Indy (141) and Tennessee (151).

Doesn't that just make you feel great... we have hope! Ummmmm, no.

Two of the top four teams that have the best defense in the league also have the worst run defense. KC gives up a WHOPPING 204 yards per game on the ground. The only team in the NFL that is worse is Detroit (208). Indy also stinks on the ground, giving up 199 per game. Passing is fraught with many more things that can go wrong, so if you can run on a team, then why pass?

The other two teams mentioned are actually good defenses for BAL only gives up 70 ypg on the ground and TEN 89 ypg.

To hammer the point home, KC has the 3rd fewest passing attempts against them at 64 (Indy is a close 4th). That's barely more than 20 pass attempts per game. The Chiefs have 111 rushing attempts against them (37 per game)! While most teams like to seek a balance in pass vs. rush, teams that are playing the CHIEFS are running almost twice as much as passing because we can't stop them.

Pathetic.

And this, mid-western kids, is why you need to get the whole story before you run off and believe anyone ever talking about something other than their own opinions, be it politics or statistics.

To Clear Up the Confusion about Obama vs. McPalin

* If you grow up in Hawaii , raised by your grandparents, you're exotic, different.
BUT IF...
* Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.

* If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
BUT IF...
* Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.

* Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.
BUT IF...
* Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.

* If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.
BUT IF...
* If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive and next in line behind a man in his eighth decade.

* If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.
BUT IF...
* If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and then left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a true Christian.

* If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.
BUT IF...
* If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.

* If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America 's.
BUT IF...
* If your husband is nicknamed "First Dude," with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

This really clears things up for me, you?

Spin (Kansas) City

Get this...

The KC City Council passes an ordinance to keep our Mayor's wife from constantly volunteering around his office (i.e., hanging out and being a bitch).

The Mayor, whose name is Mark FUNKhouser, vetoed the ordinance.

Sooooo, the Council had to vote to overturn the veto, which they did 11-1. The one vote coming from the Mayor himself... get the FUNK out!

The ordinance states that family members of elected officials can only volunteer infrequently in their relative’s elective offices.

But the Funk Master might not stop there! He's threatened a lawsuit arguing that the ordinance is special legislation aimed at a single person and thus is unconstitutional.

You simply can't make this stuff up. This drama would be better than "Spin City" except for the fact that no one involved in this matter is remotely good looking.

McCain Can't Multi-task?

Obama called McCain and suggested that they get together and focus on the economy. McCain said okie-dokie, but then suggested that they delay this Friday's first debate.

Does this bother you as much as it bothers me?

In this day and age, if you can't focus on multiple things at once, then you aren't going to connect with the rest of us who are. In this country we have many issues that are coming to a head at the same time: poor education, faltering economy, war in Iraq (Afganistan), immigration, senior entitlements, health care and more.

Two years ago, "TIME" magazine's Claudia Wallis wrote an article about the wired age. In it she states, "Human beings have always had a capacity to attend to several things at once. Mothers have done it since the hunter-gatherer era--picking berries while suckling an infant, stirring the pot with one eye on the toddler. Nor is electronic multitasking entirely new: we've been driving while listening to car radios since they became popular in the 1930s. But there is no doubt that the phenomenon has reached a kind of warp speed in the era of Web-enabled computers, when it has become routine to conduct six IM conversations, watch American Idol on TV and Google the names of last season's finalists all at once."

Perhaps McCain needs to send Palin to the debate... after all, she needs to prove that she can run a family and attend to the needs of a country at the same time. Or is that attend to the needs of a family and run a country?

The "TIME" article continues, "That level of multiprocessing and interpersonal connectivity is now so commonplace that it's easy to forget how quickly it came about. Fifteen years ago, most home computers weren't even linked to the Internet. In 1990 the majority of adolescents responding to a survey done by Donald Roberts, a professor of communication at Stanford, said the one medium they couldn't live without was a radio/CD player. How quaint. In a 2004 follow-up, the computer won hands down."

At this point, McCain should know his agenda well enough to talk about it at any time and in any place. I'm tired of these so-called "debates" not really being a debate at all.

In the words of Mills Lane, "Let's get it on."

How My Landline Became Twitter

I remember cruising the roads (The Ridge) in high school with a keen eye for anyone that we knew in a parking lot or having a party at their house... or just looking for a street race.

Yes, this was way before the time when we had cell phones, email, IM or anything else of the sort... when we got bored, we played video games on the Commodore 64 or Atari.

If we didn't make plans in advance of the evening, then we had to wing it. There wasn't a way to reach anyone that was already out and about.

So back in the day, the landline phone was the primary means of communication. The phone had replaced good old face-to-face and postal forms of communication.

When I entered the business world, the land line phone was replaced by email and instant messaging. Shoot, I'd be one cube wall away from someone and still use IM to talk to them. The ease of communication increased, but did the efficiency?

Shortly after I began my working career, I was acquired by broadcast.com and ultimately by Yahoo! the summer thereafter. Email and IM dominated the communication channels each day, but because we were a satellite office (broadcast was in Dallas and Y! in Santa Clara, while we were in San Diego), we quickly learned that we could accomplish more face-to-face in a few hours than we could accomplish over a week over email and IM. So we'd fly up to San Jose and jot over to Santa Clara for a day or two to make progress and we'd do this once every couple of weeks.

I was never much on the text messaging thing. In fact, it would bug the crap out of me when my girlfriend would continually get messages while we were out on a date (I guess I should have seen the writing on the wall sooner with that one). But then, I went to work for a text messaging company, 4INFO, and learned of the benefits that one could receive by getting information pushed to one's phone.

By spending so much time in the text world, I began to communicate via text, as well. So, instead of picking up the mobile phone to chat with friends, we'd text.

ASIDE: I still haven't figured out what I'm worse at, driving while talking or texting, but I think it's talking for me.

While talking on the mobile phone had a temporary glimmer as the primary method of communication, it was replaced by something more impersonal in text messaging, but more efficient?

Facebook has brought many of us back to the computer as the means of communication. Facebook is rather like text messaging online for you get these fast food nuggets of information about your friends wherabouts, plans or moods. Facebook is a bit more efficient, for it can help us plan for future events quite simply and easily, but it mainly helps us to stay in touch without actually being in touch. Efficient and impersonal.

Enter Twitter, which does the one to many updating that Facebook did, but now does it over a medium that is with us at all times. Broadcasting a message is efficient for finding out who is listening and then reverting back to person to person text messaging is the norm to make plans.

But, I still believe that we'd be more efficient if we'd simply make the call. I'm as bad as it as anyone. Instead of sending 25 text messages, we could spend 30 seconds on a call and take care of business.

I simply think Americans love the ring of the phone, the vibrate of the text message, the ding of a new email... and even though we claim that we want personal touch, we really prefer impersonal methods of communication because we really don't have to change what we're doing.

Again, this word "change" which is so prominent in the country right now. I firmly believe that we agree with it objectively, but not subjectively. No one wants to change; they understand where they are and fear something different. Different is an unknown quantity.

When we've been on one side of a spectrum for a long time, we have a tendency to over-compensate to the other side... I think that will be interesting in this day of a tough economy, a topsy-turvy market and a pending election with so many issues facing us: education, crime, immigration, war, entitlements, environment, etc.

Hallowine!

I love being friends with creative people. Don & Gretchen (aka, Dolce & Gabbana) are amazing graphic artists.

So bummed that I will miss this event!

The Election is an 8-course Meal, not Fast Food.

Great post on 3 Garzas & La Gringa today about how people don't take the time to really understand how politics impacts their lives... much beyond the divisive issues that continue to permeate our decision-making: abortion, immigration, war.

I'm not saying that these issues aren't important, but you have to see the whole menu people. Even though you prefer fast food news to fuel your tank, we're taking about an 8 course meal here and you can't get up from the table early.

Americans have to learn to take the time to understand that "change" is real, whether they like it or not. And that change can come at you from so many different directions that you better take the time to know what's going on with the war, the economy, social security, health care, education, immigration, energy and crime before you run off to the polls and vote for a barbie-doll VP who won't even be running the country.

CHIEFS Worth a Pot to Piss In?

Not that many of us had expectations of a fabulous NFL season here in the land of the CHIEFS. But now that we are seeing first-hand the calamity that King Carl and the Herminator have created, it is time to focus less a team that's not worth a pot to piss in and focus more on the pots that we want to piss in.

I've you've ever traveled to a another stadium in the NFL, then you'll instantly appreciate the layout of the men's bathrooms at Arrowhead, aka THE TROUGH.

Denver's Invesco? LONG LINE.
San Diego's Q (Murph)? LONG LINE.

Architects of these stadiums have forced you to stand around in line instead of watching your team play ball. Of course, all those Bronco and Chargers fans probably prefer ball-watching in the bathroom instead of on the field.

Therefore, it is imperative that we KEEP THE TROUGH at Arrowhead.

KEEPING THE TROUGH means:

• We can more quickly get back to the field to boo Herm.
• We won't miss the next unknown QB going 3 & out (or, by some chance we make a gain of longer than 10 yards, you won't miss our only first down of the game).
• We'll see all the dropped passes by the Charles & Bowe (No)Show.
• Or, if you prefer, you won't miss a single rivet, girder or rebar going into the construction (which just may be more interesting to watch right now than the team).

FIRE HERM.

CAN CARL.

KEEP THE TROUGH.