As mentioned on the business end of things, I’m in Boston at the Internet Retailer Conference & Expo, culminating in my presenting at the conference Wednesday afternoon. It’s great to be back in town–with the exception of a six-hour business meeting in January, I haven’t spent any time in Beantown in nearly a decade. We took advantage tonight, eating at a local restaurant in the North End, and I have plans to see at least one old friend before I leave town.
Massachusetts always strikes a great note with me. The history, the architecture, the weather: everything is the way I like it. A lifetime of summer visits to Cape Ann (and, more recently, Martha’s Vineyard) has certainly influenced me. And even though I’m a Yankee fan in the Red Sox’s backyard, it just feels good to be here.
Category: Personal (Page 13 of 25)
I am at http://www.facebook.com/davidwertheimer now. Wow.
(George got to Werty ahead of me. We seem to share the space–I have it on Twitter and del.icio.us and Metafilter, he has it on Flickr and Digg. Neither of us know who the YouTube Werty is, though.)
I’ve been on a reconnecting kick lately, and I’ve been diligently finding and reaching out to old colleagues on Facebook and LinkedIn (situationally dictated, of course).
It’s an interesting time to do so: I’m not looking for a job, although several of the people in my network are. Yet I wonder what my interest in connecting–now–says to my former coworkers and contacts.
Typically, building out one’s social network happens in two phases: in a big blur when first joining a network, and again a few months later as momentum builds. I’ve been on Facebook a long while now, though, and my LinkedIn profile dates all the way to 2003.
Why, then, am I reaching out now? Curiosity and comprehensiveness, mostly. That’s how I see it. But how do, say, my old Economist cubicle-mates read it? Am I hoping to hit them up for job leads? Ecommerce outsourcing opportunities? What might I want?
The truth is liberating enough, so I’m tick-ticking through my old names, building out my contacts as best I can. I’ve even updated my LinkedIn status line to indicate that I’m actually sourcing talent, not joining its pool. That plus a few lunches should go a long way. Besides, I’m an easy sell on lunch. Busy next week?
Her: “How are you feeling? My nausea is all gone now.”
Me: “Yeah, mine too. My left hand hurts, is that related?”
“My right arm hurts. And my elbow.”
“My elbow hurts too. Maybe it’s part of the virus!”
“Maybe it’s the arm I used at the toilet.”
“Ooh, which way do you lean to vomit? I lean to the left. That’s my sore arm.”
[Her: sits up in bed, assumes position] “No, I just lean forward.”
“But which side is your stabilizer?”
“My right.”
“There we go!”
My left hand and forearm really do hurt. Call it a UVI.
I’m leading a project at work that has in it, among other things, teenagers talking about proms. (It launches next week–stay tuned is now live, take a look.) One of them wrote up a little ditty on Seaside Heights, where, nearly two decades ago, I too spent my after-prom.
Apparently Seaside is still the dirty, low-budget youth destination it always was, fully worthy of the “Sleaze-side” nickname it had in the 1980s, as are its neighboring towns. Some things never change.
Which led to this exchange with my colleague Jim:
wertheimerdavid: the Seaside post completely mirrors my prom weekend experience
jim: hehe
jim: times don’t change
wertheimerdavid: nor does Seaside
jim: i was down there once
jim: point pleasant?
wertheimerdavid: yes that’s the nicer town next door
jim: that was nicer?
And so it came to pass that I found myself in Miami Beach, with the rest of my company’s senior staff, a full day ahead of schedule.
You see, we’re at Internet Retailer’s Web Design ’09 conference. IR had asked us to give web design consultations–we are among two dozen organizations selected and vetted by the conference as worthwhile partners.
The way the conference agenda is laid out is as follows:
Monday–Design and Usability Consultations
Tuesday–Main Conference – General Sessions
Wednesday–Main Conference – General Sessions
Thursday–Post-Conference Workshop: Case Studies and Critiques
And as part of the line items on Tuesday and Wednesday, the agenda says the following:
9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Web Consultations (concurrently)
What I assumed, and what I failed to clarify, and what the conference never elucidated, and what was in the consultation appointment spreadsheet but glossed over by me repeatedly, was the fact that Alexander Interactive is part of the (concurrently) and not the Monday. Which turned out to be quite a discovery at 9:00 this morning, when we were rendered temporarily useless.
So here I am at the swanky new Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, thoroughly annoyed and self-critical, while my colleagues are off visiting grandparents, fighting colds and otherwise missing in (in)action, all of us frustrated–pretty much at me–while I spin and hope the perfect Miami weather can make up for a lost day.
I have this incredible urge to say, “It could be worse. It could be raining,” but something tells me I’d better not.
Fourth annual! Here’s where I’ve stayed the past 12 months. As expected, it’s a very short list, thanks to the little guy, although we did manage to get out of the country (sort of). This list would be a lot longer if it included day trips. Cities with multiple visits are denoted with an asterisk as usual.
New York, NY * (home base)
Miami, FL
Livingston, NJ *
New City, NY *
St. John, USVI
St. Thomas, USVI
San Francisco, CA
Beach Haven, NJ
Palm Beach Gardens, FL
The coming year is shaping up to be more robust for travel, what with two business conferences already committed and a probable return to the annual Massachusetts trip. Nathan proved himself an excellent airline traveler this week, so he’ll be learning to pack his bags sooner than later.
Reuters: Blockbuster CEO open to partnerships with telecoms. “As we move toward video-on-demand and pay-per-view, Blockbuster is well positioned not only to compete on our own, but also to partner with others,” said CEO Jim Keyes.
Not mentioned in this news bulletin is that Blockbuster was a smart but failed early innovator in this space. Your host pilot tested a Blockbuster-Enron VOD partnership back in 2001, when high-speed connections and video compression were not ready for mass consumption. Perhaps this time around Blockbuster will fare better.
I will also note here that due to Time Warner Cable’s less-than-robust bandwidth in my area, and its less-than-robust widescreen VOD offerings, I still go to Blockbuster and rent DVDs when I want to see a movie at home.
I am pleased to announce the launch of a new blog, Timely Demise. It’s a side project of mine that I’ve been exploring for some time now, and I’m excited to share it with a broader audience.
Timely Demise is focused solely on how the economic crisis is changing the retail environment. What retailers are managing to expand? Who’s consolidating or closing outlets? Eliminating brands? Liquidating assets? Anything with Main Street consumer-level impact will be covered by the blog.
This comes completely out of my own worldview. As a consumer, I take a broader, market-level perspective to my own shopping. I see Banana Republic pants as a product of the upscale marque of the Gap Inc. company; I look at the new Dunkin’ Donuts on 94th and Amsterdam and consider the implications it has for the independent coffee shop on the corner. Linens ‘n Things goes bankrupt and I wonder what they’ll do to clear out inventory. It’s how my mind works, and it’s having a field day processing the current economy. So I thought I’d create a place for me to track such things.
I should expound here on my disclaimer, which is that I am an employee of an agency that works with retailers not unlike some of the companies covered in Timely Demise, and that my opinions are not at all of the expectation or hope of negative news. Quite the contrary–as an Internet strategist, I hope to be part of the short- and long-term solution for clients as they navigate a unique and difficult market. And I certainly hope that anything I cover regarding my employer’s clients will be objective–and only good news.
Please visit, bookmark, add to your feeds, etc.:
Timely Demise
Timely Demise RSS Feed
Timely Demise Atom Feed
The Ideapad quietly celebrated its tenth anniversary Saturday. It debuted on November 1, 1998, a journal of pithy notes and observances buried within an early version of the personal website, shortly after I purchased my own vanity domain.
Over the years, this page has been chronicle and witness to an eventful stage of my life. I’ve used this space to write about looking for love, falling in love, getting a dog, getting married, having a child. I’ve journaled my travels across three continents–indeed, this page is older than my passport. I’ve gotten incredible new jobs, lost jobs, tried my hand at jobs, written about others finding jobs. The common thread for all of it has been the blog.
Thanks in part to the Ideapad, I’ve been published elsewhere, on websites and in books and, not least, in Metropolitan Diary in the New York Times. I’ve taught classes, sat on panels, and spoken at industry events from Manhattan to London. I’ve landed jobs with the help of this blog and been reprimanded by employers (twice) for it.
The page has seen its share of failures. I once posted about a waning interest in writing and promptly lost half my audience. I tried and failed in 2003 to heed some smart advice to do blog consulting; a year later, David Jacobs’s Apperceptive hit a home run with it. I never monetized my site or springboarded into full-time blogging, which bothers me more than a little, since I suspect I could have done quite nicely at it, and perhaps still could, if I were able to post four times a day instead of four times a week. All misses.
And yet. With this site I’ve done more than I ever expected. I’ve met new people, made friends, entertained a multitude of readers (hi, Mom) and satisfied my creativity a thousand times over. I’ve had people call me famous, call me crazy, call me Netwert. I participated in history when I used the Ideapad to communicate with the world on 9/11, and the lone post by someone other than me, a hard-hitting recollection of that day, became a historical must-read that still gets thousands of page views monthly.
Somehow, mostly by circumstance, this page has become one of the longest continually published personal sites on the Internet. I share this accomplishment with a fair number of other weblogs that debuted in 1998, the authors of whom became my peers, simply out of kinship; to this day I read their blogs, and now their RSS and Twitter feeds, sharing the past and present with the people who helped create the blog phenomenon.
I have come to realize this site helps define me. The observances and wisecracks and personal notes that live here represent my interests, life and career. I am pleased and proud that, ten years on, the Ideapad is still here, with the same name and URL as when it began. A scan through the archives presents a unique viewpoint on my life, as written for–seen by–a blog. I look forward to whatever it watches me do next.