1. Hugh Grant. Who, by the way, did not wash his hands.
2. Maggie Gyllenhaal. Technically, outside the restroom, waiting our turn. As awkward as one would imagine.
(thanks, Zan)
Category: Personal (Page 12 of 25)
My latest column was published last night: Five Steps to Start Your M-commerce Strategy on Multichannel Merchant.
Anna points out that there’s no one place on my site that logs all my published moments. So I made one. The list is both nice and long, and way too short. Always keep writing!
I’ll have to find a home for this information, but for now, a quick rundown of my solicited external work, in reverse chronological order:
COLUMNS AND FEATURES
Multichannel Merchant, 2009
Five Steps to Start Your M-commerce Strategy
iMedia Connection, 2008
Tips for making the best impression with your emails
5 ways to avoid common email blunders
Digital Web, 2002-2004
Better Than a Human
Don't Forget to Architect the Home Page
The redesign of Economist.com
Making a Timeless User Experience
99.9% of Proper Grammar Is Obsolete
Beyond the IA Guy
Look Before You Ask
First Time Caller
Billboard, 1996-1999
I published a series of year-end Top 10 lists that appeared on both billboard.com and in Billboard magazine. Sadly, the online ones are gone and the print ones are behind a pay wall (if they’re there at all). For some reason my byline is on this article about Sugar Ray, which I may have written, although I don’t remember talking to Mark McGrath, but we’ll run with it.
BOOKS
I co-authored Usability: the Site Speaks for Itself and was a technical editor of Practical Web Traffic Analysis.
BLOGS
I write regularly here and on aiaio, the Ai blog.
I penned Timely Demise semi-professionally for 15 months until, well, yesterday.
Boing Boing, 2009
Review: Ultimate Ears super.fi 5 in-ear monitors
Review: A week with the Etymotic hf2
Review: three weeks with Audio-Technica's ATH-ANC3 noise-canceling headphones
Review: two tough weeks with the Shure SE310s
Review: JVC's HA-NC250 noise-canceling headphones
Review: Klipsch's Image X5s headphones
Review: Audio Technica ATH-CK7 headphones
Review: a week with the Etymotic ER-4 microPro
Review: Shure's SE530 headphones and faith restored
Review: Sennheiser's IE8 noise-isolating headphones
Dack.com, 2001
In Sweet Harmony
Pop Goes the Fuzz Rock
Musicrag, 2001
I did a couple of posts that are floating around the archives somewhere.
I shuttered Timely Demise today, 18 months after conceiving it, 16 months after launching it and three months after I generally lost my taste for publishing melancholy.
By most measures, the site was a success. I gained a ridiculous amount of knowledge about retail trends and the mechanics of restructuring. I received some fun press coverage. I developed a regular readership that, as of this writing, is still tuning in for news.
Google News added me as a source. I got the inestimable Choire Sicha to be my guestblogger. I began receiving anonymous tips, including one from an angry creditor pointing me to his debtor’s bankruptcy. And I had one actual news scoop hand-delivered by a company’s public relations firm.
I knew all along that this would be a tough subject to cover neatly. After all, I work for and with retailers; how can I be associated with bad news? So I tried to keep the blog objective and matter-of-fact, and that was usually enough. Yes, I know it had a rough name and a difficult topic. But at launch I felt a bit of provocation was appropriate for its moment in time. (See also: It Died, among others.)
Mostly, I found it all fascinating, as did my readers. I am much wiser about retail now than I was a year and a half ago. I suspect we all are.
A few months back, I registered timelyrevive.com with plans on shifting my focus toward expansion and profit statements. But I found that much harder to track from Timely Demise’s dedicated angle, which focused on consumer-level impact and not corporate maneuvers. Stories of 90-year-old corner stores closing make for better (and more trackable) journalism than Applebee’s #1997 opening in the local mall. I began running short on news.
So, three hundred and fourteen posts, five hundred fifty thousand page views, and eighty-nine dollars in ad revenue later, I’m hanging up my tough-news journalist’s hat. We’ll see if I can brew up something new–and more upbeat–for 2010.
I flipped back to a page of my website from 2000 just now, and after a little struggling, I zoomed the text size.
Twice.
I thought of my go bag yesterday as the city prepared for its annual 9/11 rememberance. Did you have a go bag?
We still do, packed with old shoes and gym shorts and now-sketchy bottles of water and a dog bone or two. In a sign of evolution, there are not yet baby supplies in the bag. Let’s hope we never feel compelled to update it.
I commemorate this day, as always, with links back to the related posts on Ideapad:
My blog posts about the event, September 11-23, 2001
Adam Oestreich’s first-person account, September 12, 2001
Nathan is standing by a coffee table in a Martha’s Vineyard rental house playing with a stack of red and black coasters. Dad thinks this is a good time to work on his son’s language skills, and picks up a coaster of each color.
“Nathan, this is a red coaster. Can you say red?”
“Raaah.”
“Very good! And this is a black coaster. Can you say black?”
[blank stare]
“Okay, so maybe we won’t say black.”
“Baby!”
“Want to try again? This is the red one. Can you say red?”
“Raaah.”
“Right! And this is the black one. Can you say black?”
“Elmo!”
I’ve been watching with amusement the recent recent fuss about line diets hitting the blog world, for I’ve been doing this for a number of years, and I had no idea it was actually called something.
Back in 2005 I started tracking my daily weight in an Excel spreadsheet. The system was simple: weigh myself, go into work, jot it down. I did it at work because I kept a second tab in the spreadsheet and tracked my caloric and fat intake each day. I set consumption goals, and after lunch I’d know how much room I had left for dinner and dessert.
I’ve never blogged about it because, frankly, I found it to be a rather poor diet tool. It was a terrific learning exercise–I’m far more cognizant now about just how fattening food is.
But the spreadsheet, while a fun game, was not much of a motivator. Yes, I wanted to make a pretty declining trendline, and to punch the lower limits of the chart. But I didn’t find that any more satisfying than simply stepping on the scale in the morning and seeing how I did. Data points, to me, were decidedly unsexy.
I kept returning to the spreadsheet on and off into 2008, mostly for the daily food lists, which were better at keeping me honest (and just a label-reading version of Weight Watchers’ point system). Then I gave up, got really fat, and have lost weight in the past year simply by convincing myself to snack less. Spreadsheets are great, but they don’t provide willpower. And on a successful diet, a spreadsheet is redundant–the evidence is in the mirror.
Review: A week with the Etymotic hf2, by yours truly, on Boing Boing Gadgets.
Last week I was on line at Duane Reade and watched the man in front of me ask for a pair of headphones. He selected a Maxell model from behind the register; it was $14.99, I think, maybe a bit more. He contemplated them for a moment.
“Those are very good,” said the cashier, blithely.
“Okay,” said the customer, who paid and walked out.
Suffice to say I am not that guy.
I have always had, and appreciated, top-flight portable audio, from my fancy Sony Walkmans in the 1980s to several pairs of expensive noise-canceling headphones in recent years. And with my tinnitus forcing me to listen to in-ear music at low volumes, having good noise isolation has been a must.
At the tail end of bicycle commuting last summer, I ran over my headphones–my $150, pristine-sounding, noise-isolating, wondrous Shure E3c headphones–with my front tire. Oops. I used them anyway, broken and sad, for several months.
It took me that long to figure out which headphones to buy, and the ones I finally got were good but not great. Useful reviews of noise-canceling and noise-isolating headphones are hard to come by. I don’t need wonky audio spectrum surveys, or dissections of the nuances of Django Renhardt’s solos: what I need is, do they sound good? and how well do they shut out the outside world?
So I decided to do what any good blogger should: do it myself. I pitched Joel Johnson, formerly of Boing Boing Gadgets, and he gave me the go-ahead. Two months of emails later, I have $2880 worth of headphones in my dining room, a ridiculous categorical spreadsheet, and a fun, interesting commute to work. Goofy expressions like “in hog heaven” come to mind.
The first review went live today, with 10 more to run through the summer. My thanks go out to Joel and to Rob Beschizza, my new editor, who inherited this project and has been most gracious and helpful. Look for more posts on BBG and some additional commentary in this space as the project continues.
Gee, I haven’t done this in a while.
I’m onto something interesting following Alice, the new ecommerce website that enables CPG companies to sell quasi-direct to consumer. On aiaio, I dissect whether the alice.com business model is really new, and next week I’ll be critiquing the site’s shopping experience.
On Timely Demise: Crabtree & Evelyn’s bankruptcy and a handful of old and local stores this week. And, with a sigh, Joe Jr.’s Restaurant in the Village.
Select recent oh-so-important tweets:
- + They may *seem* just like other bread products, but pretzel rods are decidedly not breakfast food.
- + Cyclists: can I dangle a bag of Chinese food delivery off my rear-tire rack and bike home without losing my dinner?
- +I have an undying and boundless love for mom-and-pop hardware stores.
- +I STILL LOVE MY PAPER TACO TRUCK it’s on top of my cubicle ready to serve paper tacos to paper college students
- + Reviewing headphones. Having a blast.
- + “Madoff has been sentenced to 150 years, although he hinted that he could turn it into 350 for you with almost no risk.” http://cli.gs/j20tm
And, of course, Nathan got a Cozy Coupe.
Tonight I biked home with Chinese delivery. (It ultimately fit in my bike bag, not on the handlebars like the pros do it.) Photo by the inimitable Anna Perez.