February 2013
1 post
Of Mail Electronic
People love to hate on e-mail. I find this kind of amazing, given how essential it has become in our lives and how much better it is as a communications tool than anything that came before.
I sent my first e-mail in 1994. Work account, not sure I had ever truly considered the odd @ sign on the keyboard before that. I remember being on the phone with a friend who lived across the country and...
January 2013
2 posts
“He was my best friend for 25 years, and he’s just irreplaceable. Irreplaceable...”
– Larry Ellison, to CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo, Oct. 2, 2012
December 2012
2 posts
Permanence
We were lucky enough to go to the recent 12-12-12 Concert for Sandy Relief, a six-hour benefit show featuring a pretty incredible lineup that Mick Jagger described from the stage as the “largest collection of old English musicians ever assembled in Madison Square Garden.”
As we sat there, watching Bruce Springsteen, Roger Waters, Eric Clapton, Billy Joel, The Rolling Stones, Bon Jovi,...
November 2012
1 post
Disasters Big And Big
(Northport Harbor, L.I., morning of October 30, 2012)
Like many others in the Northeast, over the last several days we have been dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which rolled through our quiet community in an unquiet way early last week, knocked out power almost immediately and knocked down many trees after that. Our house is still dark, our neighborhood slightly shell shocked,...
September 2012
3 posts
If This, Maybe Not That
A little more than a year ago, I got an invite (from a Twitter buddy) to try out a new Web service called IFTTT.
The basic construction was built on connecting online services in a simple causal relationship - If this, then that. Initially skeptical that I could find any use for a tool like this, I started playing around, creating recipes in IFTTT terminology, and actually found it pretty...
“Traditional marketing has been about the megaphone. ‘Here’s our message, we’re...”
– @dickc, to @charlierose, on mobile marketing
Defending The Indefensible - A Few Words About...
Everyone hates embargoes. It’s true. I’m talking about the PR person-to-journalist kind here, not the more benevolent version that applies to Cuba or North Korea. If you are ever in the mood for some sausage-making, naval-gazing goodness, just cruise around the Web and read up on how writers feel about this structured, and increasingly prevalent, information exchange. Actually, let me save you...
August 2012
2 posts
Authentic Bread
Authentic. It’s a powerful word. It can be applied to a million different things, in a million different ways, but has just one universal, accessible meaning. Authentic. Genuine. Real. Right.
We spend a good amount of time in Vermont (authentic state) and at some point started to patronize a sandwich shop that offered “sourdough wheat” as one of its bread choices. It was...
Perfect "Mix-Less" Margarita
Margaritas and summertime are a study in symbiosis, and one we’ve been happy to extensively explore across our adult lives.
We like them by the pool, we like them when the kids are out of school, we like them at the beach, they’re never too far out of reach. At the end of the day, most any kind of way…
The only real problem is that, historically and by convention, margaritas...
July 2012
1 post
Perfect Pizza Dough
We’ve been making pizza at home for years. It’s a great casual and rolling family meal, even better with family and friends. You get your ingredients together, heat up a pizza stone to around 500 degrees in the oven or on the grill, and just start cranking out pies. Red sauce with mozzarella, white with mozzarella, or goat cheese, or a combo of both and toppings like spinach, caramelized onions,...
June 2012
2 posts
Breathing It In
I remember making a concerted effort to pause a few times over the course of my wedding day and really breathe it in. I wanted to be able to appreciate the things that were happening around me, to access them again in my mind, and not just get lost in the blur of this Big Day as it moved from step one, to step two, to steps three through ten and then - before I knew it - step over.
You could...
“To try to model yourself after Steve Jobs, I mean, again, it would be like,...”
– Maybe the best line to come out of this week’s D10 conference, Larry Ellison, to Walt Mossberg, on his friend Steve Jobs
May 2012
2 posts
“I think the marriage of some really great client apps with some really great...”
– Steve Jobs, with @waltmossberg and @karaswisher, at D5 - May 30, 2007. Five years ago. Five. Years. Ago.
D10 is next week. Who’s going to say something that shines as clear a light on 2017?
They Might Be Giants
The Cablevision cable TV sales reps walked through my suburban Long Island neighborhood in December of 1975, promising better reception and a new channel called HBO.
They carried these little “HBO On Air” guides with them, left behind as part of the sales pitch, a featured film on the cover, full listings inside. “The Towering Inferno” was on the cover that first month,...
April 2012
4 posts
“Women say things to each other, and the next day they go shopping. Men say...”
– So many great nuggets in this brief NYT Q&A with Garry Marshall, including this line. Quick read, worth it.
“He found a promoter who nearly fell off the...
“Even after he went back to Apple, there was nothing Jobs liked more than...”
– One of my favorite graphs from The Lost Steve Jobs Tapes, Brent Schlender’s terrific look at Steve Jobs and the critical role his “wilderness years” played in the success that followed
Taking advantage of the new @tumblr-@Spotify...
March 2012
1 post
Enthusiasts
If you follow Anthony Bourdain on Twitter, you may have noticed that he has probably the best one-word bio in the Twittersphere:
Enthusiast.
Tech blogger and Apple enthusiast John Gruber is right up there as well, in the land of the great one-word Twitter bios, with Raconteur. AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka’s two-word self description also bears mention, especially for someone who writes...
February 2012
3 posts
#PRJams
Started a new thing on Twitter about a month ago, Tweeting the hashmark #PRJams every Friday, along with a Spotify link to a song appropriate for the theme.
Selections so far:
I Want You To Want Me by Cheap Trick
Don’t Talk by 10,000 Maniacs
No Surprises by Radiohead
Crosstown Traffic by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
and, specifically directed at road warrior agency vets, I’ve...
Apple sold more iOS devices in 2011 than all the... →
parislemon:
Title by Horace Dediu says it all. With that in mind, the fact that OS X is becoming more iOS-like rather than the other way around should surprise absolutely no one.
“We’re dropping the computer from our name and, from this day forward, we’re going to be known as Apple, Incorporated, to reflect the product mix that we have today.” - Steve Jobs, Macworld...
Impossible Happens
“Hey Bill, it’s Steve…”
So much has been written and said about Steve Jobs and the success he had bringing Apple back from the brink and making it what it is today. But there’s one element of the turnaround that, on a human level, is maybe as remarkable as the technological vision and operational excellence that made it all happen.
By the middle of 1997, Jobs was...
January 2012
3 posts
“The only thing New York about the Giants is the NY on the helmet. They train in...”
– @GovChristie on the “New York” Giants, to @davidgregory on @meetthepress, 1-22-12.
Watch
Device revelation of the winter has to be the GoPro HD Hero helmet-mounted video camera Gwen gave me for Christmas, which I’ve been using to get great footage of the girls skiing on Bromley Mountain in Vermont.
Gone - mercifully - are the days of stopping everything mid-run, fumbling around with my iPhone and trying to capture a few moments of on-trail goodness without freezing my...
Plumbing In Print
Twitter is definitely here, real and important, especially for those who deal in content and information every day - “part of the plumbing” as the NYT’s David Carr once correctly observed.
But, sometimes, actual human events meet 140-character micro-blogging service references in the press, call them plumbing in print, still bring a smile and shake-of-the-head chuckle.
Like...
December 2011
1 post
Taylor Swift at MSG
We took the girls to see Taylor Swift at Madison Square Garden last week, last stop on the North American leg of her Speak Now Tour. Tweeted some Instagram photos from the venue, figured I’d post them here as well. Best live performance we’ve ever experienced as a family, and I’m including Dora Live and The Wiggles in that assessment.
She’s a talented artist who puts on a...
November 2011
5 posts
Isaacson On Jobs
Finally finished Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs bio this morning. It was very good, not insanely great. Extremely comprehensive and obviously required reading for Apple fans, students of business or technology and the generally curious, but probably not the transcendent and definitive work biographer and subject had in mind when they got together a few years ago, maybe a few years too late.
...
Sharing, Transparency And Who Decides
Twitter gave me something new this week. Showed up on Tuesday morning, right there on my desktop, a little “Activity” tab to make sure I knew exactly, in real time, when the people I follow were deciding to follow others (and making it easy for me to do the same), when they were marking Tweets as “favorites,” and other ways they were using a service I love, value and rely...
Music Metamorphosis
I grew up listening to music on vinyl records, 33 1/3s, 45s were largely before my time. Saved my money when I wanted something, snagged a ride to the mall, spent hours wandering around Sam Goody or some other brick and mortar store and then came home to listen to my prized possessions. Possessions.
Later on, I moved with everyone else into Walkman and car stereo-friendly (most of the time)...
“When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your...”
– Best Steve Jobs quote in the surprisingly mediocre (except for Walt and Woz) PBS profile, Steve Jobs - One Last Thing.
October 2011
4 posts
PR Pro Tips, 2011 Edition
I’ve noted before, here and in other places, that the job that keeps our family in pizza and Apple products is communications, media relations, PR, flakdom, whatever you want to call it. I’ve been thinking about how the practice has changed over the years and put down in writing five “pro tips” I think are critical for being successful today, the high-order bits in our current environment....
Lining Up
There’s a pizza place in New Haven, CT called Pepe’s that we try to hit every chance we get, usually on the drive up to or back from Vermont. It opened in 1925, and what’s kind of amazing about that is people are still - today - lining up outside the door to get at the spectacular creations that come out of the ovens inside.
You could drive there right now and chances are...
Thank You
I felt like I wanted to write something. But, with everything else that has been said and written this week about Steve Jobs - from people who actually knew him, worked with him, covered him - the idea of chiming in with a few paragraphs of my own seemed at once superficial and presumptuous.
What could I possibly add to the rare and personal reflections of Walt Mossberg, the simple perfection of...
September 2011
1 post
“I think part of what goes on with conferences now is, it’s sort of lonely...”
– One of my favorite quotes from “Page One,” courtesy of David Carr, or @carr2n.
August 2011
1 post
All The News That's Fit To Tweet
Bill Keller’s gone-but-cosmically-cached Twitter rant is even more surprising when you consider that The New York Times is arguably the most active media outlet in the world on the platform, and you don’t have to take my word for it.
Kicking around the paper’s website this morning I found this amazing page, a well-designed and functional compilation of active NYT journalist and...
July 2011
3 posts
Feed Fatigue
A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent me an invite to Google+. I like new things, tend to be pretty Google-centric in my life on the Web (still consider Gmail one of the best things to ever happen to me), so I signed up and built a circle around some familiar early adopters. And, once the buzz of my green badge of inclusion started to wear off, the realities associated with integrating yet another...
June 2011
3 posts
Bad PR
It’s impossible to follow journalists on Twitter and fail to notice frequent, and frequently hilarious, Tweets related to a condition that is probably best described as bad PR. There’s a Twitter feed devoted to the most glaring examples of this, some reporters actually have blogs that document bad/annoying PR tactics.
You know it when you see it, the overuse of jargon or clichés in...
I do, but I can't say
Steve Jobs: There’s a lot of things that are risky right now, which is always a good sign, you know, and you can see through them, you can see to the other side and go, yes, this could be huge. But there’s a period of risk that, you know, nobody’s ever done it before.
Kara Swisher: Do you have an example?
Steve Jobs: I do, but I can’t say.
- D5 Conference, AllThingsD, May 30, 2007...
The Lighter Time
I’ve developed a slightly grudging appreciation for winter over the years, even though the lights go out too early. Skiing, especially as a family, changed my perception of snow. Have always enjoyed the colors and crispness of fall. Spring never knows exactly what it wants to be, rain and mud, afternoon thunderstorms and indecision - coat, or no coat? Raincoat? But then there’s that...
May 2011
4 posts
Responsible
“Live from the heart of yourself. You have to make a living, I understand that, but you also have to know what sparks the light in you, so that you – in your own way – can illuminate the world.” “Nobody, but you, is responsible for your life. It doesn’t matter what your Momma did, doesn’t matter what your Daddy didn’t do, you are responsible for your life. And what is your life?...
Thoughts on Twitter
New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller’s recent column on social media in general, and Twitter in particular, prompted me to sit back and reflect on the service, how I use it and what it has meant in my personal and professional life. Had conceiving and pushing “send” on 4,000 of my own Twitter updates, and reading maybe a million more, made me – as Keller suggested – stupid? The response to...
Robots!
Four unsolicited “comments” to four different posts on my long-dormant personal blog in the last three days, all from profiles that link back to WordPress sites I will not visit.
Too authentic and genuine not to share:
5/6/11
Suomi - “Great stuff here. .Oh, I love this one! I just stumbled across your blog and enjoy reading your blog is fabulous! Thank you for sharing your ...
April 2011
4 posts
Steve Jobs, on Life and Death
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to...
