October 2004

My little entry about the Red Sox parade photos I took at their victory parade the other day are getting lots of clicky clicks thanks to Google. Well, that’s nice and all. But also don’t forget to vote for John Kerry on Tuesday.

So … please, please, please vote on Tuesday.

I’m baffled when I run into people who are undecided or are definitely voting for Bush. I had no idea I knew any billionaires. Who else would be voting for him?

The Internets Veterans For Truth are a few long-time bloggers, designers, and techies who decided (in slackerly fashion, around the end of last week) that some of the clips that’ve been floating around online needed to be seen by everybody.

Michael, Yves, Amy and I met up at the Central Square Starbucks at 8:15 this morning and wandered up Mass Ave to find a spot on Boylston Street for the Red Sox Parade/Rolling Rally. I took a bunch of photos with Michael’s camera which he’s uploaded as a Red Sox parade photo set at flickr. I was skeptical at first that they were doing a parade instead of a rally. But it worked out very well. I probably wouldn’t have gotten many (if any) great photos had they not stopped right in front of us.

Scott Johnson was back in town so he invited people on the Berkman Thursday Weblog Writers Mailing List to get together for dinner at The Bombay Club tonight. Buzz Bruggeman and Tom LeVine were in Cambridge after the Pop!Tech Conference. Buzz told Shimon and I about his company ActiveWords, a Windows application that alas, won’t work on Zapata, my iBook. I may have to dust off my old Dell laptop to try it out. (Small detail: the Dell’s monitor is mostly detached from the computer. It’s not pretty.)

While trying to wade through a zillion weblogs after being in NYC for the past six days, I caught up with Yves writing about his 2003 switch from The Yankees to The Red Sox.

I’m evaluating Basecamp, online project management software, for a client and my own projects. I sent them (Basecamp HQ) an email about a feature request/curiosity. It seemed worthwhile to be able to associate due dates with tasks. They do provide deadlines with milestones and you can also cross-reference a to do list with a particular milestone. But I thought it would be useful to also have dates associated with a to do list, too.

I received a very speedy response. When responding to my inquiry, Jason said:

We do not plan on adding dates to to-do items. Milestones have dates,
but to-do items are simply to-do items. We’re really working on
keeping things simple and focused.

I would have to disagree with my request being a complicated and unfocused feature! But it was good to get a fast response nonetheless. Overall, Basecamp is a very interesting piece of web software. I’ve always wondered why there haven’t been better tools out there (especially webby ones) so that we’re not stuck with awful tools like Microsoft Project. Basecamp to the rescue? They have a weblog, too, called Everything Basecamp.

Via the Boston Community at Live Journal.

I told Michael the other day that the Red Sox finally, truly needed to step up. Who knew they could actually do it. Nice! I’ve been in NYC since Tuesday and haven’t seen a single person on the subway wearing a Yankees hat, shirt, etc. Curious.

During my trip to Nebraska last week I took oodles of photographs when I was back for my grandmother’s funeral. The above photo was taken while my sister Amy and I were zooming along Highway 275 from Fremont on our way to the airport in Omaha for my flight home to Boston. I finally had a chance to meet my new (first!) baby niece who was born in late May. I also scanned a few old photos that Amy found while cleaning out our mom’s house to get it ready to sell. I especially like this photo of my grandparents, mom and uncle taken for a holiday card sometime in the early or mid 1960s. There’s also a photo of my family taken at Easter 1978. Hopefully someone saved the photo of my sister and I at Easter the year before where we both had pigtails and bright red hair.

I dislike the word networking. I dislike this word very, very much. I was telling an aquintance about a new project/biz I’m working on with a friend and his response was “I guess it pays to network.” Argh! Anyone who was online before 1996 might remember that before people were “networking” they were making friends, sharing, collaborating and just getting to know other humans around the globe and making connections. I could care less what sort of usefulness another human might provide through “networking.” In 2004, I’m starting to feel like this philosophy is in the minority. Now we have all these websites like Ryze, Orkut, Tribe and Friendster who presumably help us “network.” Most of the time they seem more like redundant popularity contests. How many times do we need to retype in the same blah blah blah?

I suppose this is a rant. ;) I need to come up with a better way to describe what I do when I get people together for events/gatherings/etc. Or can we reclaim the word networking so it means something other than “what can you do for me”?