Category: General musings

  • Lunch with a former colleague …

    Lunch with a former colleague I hadn’t seen in 7 years. People change a lot/don’t change at all.

  • All clogged up

    This is going to be a short and badly written blog post. It’s devoid of content. It has no theme. It really won’t make that much sense. I’m trying to expunge a serious case of writer’s block by — what else — writing about it. And I’ve been cursed at the worst possible moment. I need…

  • Email marketing results measured in basis points, and it’s all our fault

    This is post is for all my colleagues in the marketing biz. I want to tell you that we collectively destroyed email. What did we do that was truly stupid? Simple: we have so overdone email that now it’s useless for all of us. Have you noticed that no matter what you do — text…

  • Puttin’ it all together on the ‘Net

    My good friend Chris Williams, CEO of Vuuch, emailed me the other day and said that I really had to talk with Josh Mings of solidsmack.com. I just got off the phone with Josh, and I can say is, “Thanks, Chris, for connecting us up.” See, Chris is a “true believer” in community — when he…

  • All right, so it’s been over a month …

    All right, so it’s been over a month since I last posted. I’ve been busy at work and, well, I must say nothing has pissed me off enough to blog. Still, I care about having a personal blog and keeping it active. The question then becomes: what to say when you are (temporarily) speechless. Writing…

  • Are you feeling like you’ve been screwed, but can’t quite figure out how?

    Maybe it’s your health care insurer manipulating your out-of-network health care claim reimbursements to increase their profits. Remember last fall when you signed up for the significantly more expensive plan that lets you choose a doctor out-of-network? You thought you were being smart. Instead, it turns out you’re being screwed. Your extra premiums are finding…

  • A whale of a demagogue

    I was channel surfing recently (no mean feat on a Verizon FIOS system), and paused briefly on Animal Planet’s Whale Wars. I was instantly riveted…but not because of what the show is ostensibly about. Briefly, it’s a cinema verité recounting of the struggle between environmental radicals and the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean. The…

  • My daughter, the poet

    It is with great pleasure and pride that I turn over my blog, temporarily, to my daughter Rebecca so she can publish her humorous poem, The Germ Soldier. If you’ve ever seen a middle-schooler with a runny nose, you’ll relate to her art. The Germ Soldier By Becca Neihaus They spread like throwing sand, Since…

  • Quick bytes from turkey weekend

    Really quickly: I’m eatin’ turkey — a lot of turkey I’ve updated to WP 2.6.5 and still can’t get the blog to work with podPress 8.8 despite all the posts about how to do so and the “no revisions” plugin. Damn, this is tiresome. When will Automattic realize they are killing bloggers with these incompatibilities.…

  • Vieux Boulogne or Durian: Can a French Software Company Blog?

    This is one of those posts where I had so many metaphors going through my head as I wrote it that I’m gonna list ’em for you before I write the post because even I can’t keep ’em straight. And who wants to miss a good metaphor? Vieux Boulogne is the world’s stinkiest cheese Durian…

  • Vinyl records aren’t staging a comeback so don’t look for social media wisdom from analysts

    This morning, I was searching for blog posts about Gartner research and came across this one from David Scott really tucking it to Gartner for their lack of authenticity in social networking. It’s no big surprise that David thinks they’re inept. If there’s a firm on the planet that has fewer bona fides in social networking…

  • Listen to Randy Newman’s Harps and Angels before it’s too late

    I’ve been a rabid Randy Newman fan since I was in college. When I was a student producer in the mid-1970’s at WBUR, I tried desperately (and unsuccessfully) to get Newman to interview on a show I produced called Around the Hub. It wasn’t so much that I thought Newman was of interest to the…