iPhone: the wait may well be over...

The features, the 3G, the integrations with my Mac, the *price*.. and of course the age of my old Hello Moto Pebl.. all this adds up to a big hunk of geezelouiseitstimetobuytheiPhone...
Here's the WWDC Keynote in 60 seconds (courtesy of MahaloDaily):

Evening walks..

We love going for walks with the neighbor kids.. Springtime in Nashville is just a great time of year..

Breakfast: any given Sunday...

Breakfast: any given Sunday...
Originally uploaded by sleepydad

breakfast at our house on any given Sunday..

I'm on the Nothing Show!

This is truly weeks overdue but what can I say, it's been crazy.. and I've been lazy...
but HOLY CRAP! I'm on the Nothing Show!!!

What's the Nothing Show? you really just need to give it a listen to get it.. it's a great little podcast put together by Dave Delaney and Tim Coyne-- improvisational comedy using posts on Twitter as the only source material. Awesome.
Not sure that my tweets of the week preceeding the show really lived up to the quality of previous installments.. but it's an honor just to get nominated... and what a surreal experience to listen to Dave read my silly Tweets.

Dunkin Google Street View..

So Nashville Twitterati are all abuzz with the warm glow of Google Street View showing off all the sights in our fair town... if you know where I live, you can take a happy little Sunday Drive through my neighborhood and see my wife wait patiently for you to pass at an intersection on our street before she pulls out. It's always calm on Google Street view, you never have to worry about using your blinker.. and it's always late summer/early fall there. It's beautiful.

So tonight it occured to me to check out my old home town-- Leominster Massachusetts. And while almost none of Leominster appears to have been covered by the Street View crew, there were a couple of major thoroughfares near my old house highlighted in StreetView-blue, so I decided to take a little tour around town. It's been almost 8 years since I've been back there afterall.

And I have to say, this is a weird experience. I can imagine what it would be like driving through town-- that feeling of familiarity mixed with the alien sense of things not quite the same.
That alien feeling is all the more intense when you're 'driving' around town through a series of sometimes-not-all-so-contiguous freeze frames of streets and traffice.

But it's still pretty freakin' cool!

And then, just as I was about to wrap up, I decided to take a run down Central Street.. it caught my eye because on the Map, it appears that there's a big gap in the Street-View highlighting.. as if they skipped a quarter-mile of the road when they were filming. Did they lose the hard drive that day? bad sector?

So I pressed the Google accelerator and pressed onward toward the breach.. and a funny thing happened.
We turned into a parking lot.
Passed a row of cars.. passed the Leominster House of Pizza, where I used to get the biggest and best pepperoni pizzas any kid just finished with a little league or street hockey game has ever had.
and we pulled in for a quick stop at the Dunkin' Donuts.

Hey wow, they added a Dunkin Donuts in our little Johnny Appleseed Plaza. Cool! Hey wait a minute...


View Larger Map

Yep.. seems dude at Google didn't turn the camera off when he stopped in for a piss and a cup of Joe, I guess.

"Friends you know.. or pretend to know.."

...only you me and Michael Arrington will understand this..
Yes, we have beer cozies.

Top 5 Quarterbacks All Time

With the retirement of Brett Favre this week, there's been a lot of talk-- okay, almost all of it on ESPN Radio's Mike and Mike morning radio show..

So, for what it's worth, here's my Top 5 All-Time NFL Quarterbacks

1. Joe Montana
2. Johnny Unitas
3. John Elway
4. Terry Bradshaw
5. Dan Marino

Who are your influences?

Bands have always talked about their early influences-- giving a little window onto those elements that factored into their early development and made them who they are today. Did you listen to the Beatles or Elvis? Zepplin or The Who? Ratt or Motley Crue?

Nick Hornby's novel, High Fidelity, which was of course later adapted (pretty well) as a film, gets into this quite a bit as Rob, the main character, is constantly sorting and resorting his record collection.. reorganizing and reprioritizing those little sentimental pieces of himself contained in those records-- the times and places and people they represent to him.

I think about this from time to time-- in terms of music, literature, television, even philosophy... all things that put a little structure in your brain, that affects how you think about things from that point on.. These are the things you find yourself going back to over and over again, referencing in conversation, using to define some abstraction in your head.. or maybe these are just the experiences of things you reminisce about when you have a little time to think about the old days.

So who would I list as my influences?
Pink Floyd
Rush
Led Zepplin
Star Wars
The Tom Baker Doctor Who
J.D. Salinger
Plato, Republic
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Bill Buckley
Michael Ondaatje
The ClueTrain Manifesto
Hornby, High Fidelity (I can't leave it out after I mention it in explaining my point, can I?)

So who are your influences?

Brett Hangs 'Em Up...

This is one of those sublime moments when you see the real heart of a competitor surrendering finally to age, fatigue.. finding himself in a place where he's forced to say "It's over."

Twitter in Plain English

Once again, the good people at CommonCraft-- Lee and Sachi LeFever-- bring order to the chaos and give us the words and images we need to explain something so simple and yet so incomprehensible to our friends and relatives..
On second thought.. I'm not sure I want my relatives a) reading my Tweets; or b) Tweeting themselves.

All the same-- this is awesome.

Best. Ad. Ever.

More Geoff Smith

Okay, one more..

Speaking of Geoff Smith...

It's amazing to discover the talent hidden in the people right around you.
Well, in Geoff's case, it's not hidden-- it's bursting out of him just constantly.

It's hard to be three...

We've been reminded repeatedly in the last many weeks, my wife and I, that we have a three year-old in the house. Or rather, we must remind ourselves of that-- otherwise, we might be inclined to think we're doing a really, really poor job as parents.
Behaviors from Bryce, the three year old, range from:
1) explosive tantrums
2) foot stomping
3) dramatic crossing of arms and cinching of brow
4) shouting that sounds more like barking "no no NOO!"
5) swinging of arms, pounding of fists-- on others, on self, on inanimate objects-- often accompanied by #2, foot-stomping.

I could go on.
And all this for simple offenses (by us, the parents) such as
1) requiring a jacket be worn when going outside
2) asking that Bryce take turns with his older brother
3) mandating that jelly beans and chocolate chip cookies are not good breakfast foods

Explosive. This is the word that most easily comes to mind lately when I describe my younger son's moods these days.

You'd think we'd have learned. I mean, we did live a whole year with a three year-old in the house once before. But that was a few years ago.. and our collective memory is not what it should be in matters like these.

So, sad as it is, I took some solace today when I read Blabbermouse's recent post, "In the Key of Three," about her own son, also three, and some of the behavior they've been seeing.

Parents in community with one another-- so much of the bonding we do comes from this basic feeling: "Oh thank God, we're not the only ones!"

You know what they say about opinions... John Rocker is an asshole.

Oh John Rocker, you are so 10 years ago.
You may have been on the juice.
And Bud Selig may have known it.
Hell, who couldn't have guessed it?

But I'm sorry to inform you: you're still not relevant.

PodCamp Nashville 2008

Good times!
So how'd you spend your Saturday?
I think my wife thought I was crazy for getting up at 6:30 on a Saturday morning.
But it all came together quite nicely, I think. As with BarCampNashville back in the summer, Dave Delaney and Kelly Stewart (along with Ted Chapin, Marcus Whitney, Alison Groves, and a host of others) put on a great event-- we counted 181 attendees-- with a pretty good mix of presenters.
Ranging from people who are figuring out how to make a real living on podcasting, to a few different talks about some of the gear and software involved in making the whole process go. And then, of course, Dave had to talk about Twitter! So key.
Keynotes were by CC Chapman-- whose sisters confided that they call him Charlie-- and Joseph Jaffe. I didn't get to hear every word, but if memory serves-- Chapman reflected on the Barcamp/Podcamp Social media phenomenon and urged everyone to get involved, get up and talk, reach out to people and get something started. Jaffe's talk focused on the revolutionary things that are happening as user-generated content-- podcasts, primarily-- are changing the equation for radio and other old media. Television will still own the living room-- to paraphrase Jaffe-- but Podcasts will own the gym, the walk to work, the commute.. virtually everything outside the living room.
Talk of the day didn't really have a lot to do with podcasting, per se. Scott Schwertly, of Ethos3-- a self-described "epic storyteller"-- gave a presentation about giving world-class presentations.. and it's safe to say, the guy knows how to put a slide deck together. Not sure if the literary world would agree with his own assessment of his storytelling-- but it certainly is nice to see someone remind us that giving a talk-- whether it's to give a pitch, teach a class, convey a concept or otherwise connect with an audience-- telling a good, intellectually or, more often, emotionally engaging story is perhaps the most effective mechanism for getting one's point across. Nicely done.
Then, when it was all said and done-- we took down the screen, put up the chairs (apologies to anyone who's chair I may have stolen prematurely-- we got pretty tight on time there at the end)... and a bunch of us made our way over to the Big Bang on Broadway. Geoff Smith, a member of the BarCamp/Podcamp crew-- it turns out he plays a little piano there. Who knew?
Actually, he's flat-out amazing. If you're in Nashville, go to the Big Bang. Do not delay. My advice, get there before 7:30.

Click here for pictures from PodCampNashville

And here's a short video Dave shot at the Big Bang..

"Like a day out of the old New York"

Lupica's got a nice story in today's Daily News about the parade in Manhattan for the Giants.

The last time there were crowds like this on the streets of lower Manhattan, they had been heading north on the worst day the city has ever had. Tuesday they were on their way downtown again, trying to get the best places on Broadway to cheer a team that for a few weeks lifted us all.

Think Tom's learned another lesson since Sunday?

Don't get me wrong, I have a great deal of respect for the New England Patriots, and even Tom Brady. But does this not go down as one of the great crow-eating moments in sports?
It's one thing for a young, upstart, underdog team like the Giants to spout their mouths off during Media day and say all kinds of things they're "not supposed to say." But for a guy like Tom Brady to dismissively ridicule Plaxico for making the prediction, while indirectly making a prediction, himself: I mean, *smirk*, don't all reasonable people agree that the Pats are going to score more than 17? Haha.. hoho..

Get over yourself, Tom.
Glad you learned a thing or two about New York other than where to pick up Supermodels.

Oh but it is good to be Giants...

Can you blame Strahan for giving voice to the feelings that must have been reverberating through the Giants lockerroom for weeks before the Superbowl.. if not during the stretch of the playoffs?
This team was consistently overlooked by the national media, never given credence.. disrespected...

I grew up in a house of Giants and Patriots fans.. dual loyalties in me that have never been so divided as they are now. Time was, the Pats were safely irrelevant while the Giants won championships in 86 and 90. In years since, of course, the Pats have become content with their own greatness. Smug, even. And with the way they were beating teams in the regular season this year, who could blame them.

But for whatever reason, even as great as the Pats appeared to be, no one was paying attention to the Giants-- their 10 wins, undefeated on the road... underdogs throughout the playoffs... yes, even going into Tampa in week 1. Tampa? Seriously.

I mean these are the guys who were chided by the press (and the Pats, themselves, of course-- more on that in a bit) for their 'false confidence', their chest-out talk, their predictions following Media Day. They broke all the superstitious rules-- and afterall, these Patriots know how to behave on Media Day and look at them, all well-behaved and tight-lipped...

After all that, who wouldn't be tempted to say "Howya like us now?"

So forgive the Giants if they're flat-out obnoxious in victory. With the way that they pushed the Patriots around on the field (where it counts, right?), just physically overpowering the offensive line, knocking the great, un-muddied Tom Brady to the ground a dozen times or so-- has Brady ever been so harrassed in a game?-- with the way the Giants' smash-mouth broke the Pats' finesse, they deserve to get a little bit back. Turnabout is fairplay.

Dudes...

Good stuff.