Ideapad

• Aaron Boone retires, joins ESPN as baseball analyst - ESPN
  Article: "His career-defining moment came in the old Yankee Stadium in the form of an 11th-inning, Game 7 of the 2003 AL Championship Series that lifted New York past the Boston Red Sox and into the World Series." Not entirely true. I best remember him for playing basketball that off-season, screwing up his left knee, and getting his Yankee contract voided. ESPN has a habit of hiring analysts who are not very good at making smart decisions (see also: Phillips, Steve)
  (tags: baseball)

Posted by David Wertheimer at 7:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

• Official Google Docs Blog: A web clipboard for Google Docs
  The entire OS is on its way into the cloud. If this works smoothly on the iPad the paradigm shift will be striking
  (tags: web wow cloudcomputing)

Posted by David Wertheimer at 7:03 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

• A Whole Lotta Nothing: Break Bread for Brad
  See you there.
  (tags: friends weblogs)

Posted by David Wertheimer at 7:03 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

From my post on aiaio:

Yes, there are premium seats available; no, you can't have them. I asked if I could pay extra to reserve those seats: no. I asked if I could get a seat assignment, any seat assignment, so I knew I would make it on the plane: no. I eventually gave up my attempts to cajole customer service into helping me, and after a few hours of deliberation, I took my business elsewhere.

My story isn't all that uncommon, but it still strikes me as a miss on Continental's part. Why must they hold a random middle seat for an unbooked elite member, thereby denying a paying customer a chance to confirm travel?

Between this and Continental's other discomforts—a small 31" seat pitch in coach; 60,000 miles to book coach-class reward travel—I haven't flown CO in more than five years. In the interim I've been on American, JetBlue, Virgin Atlantic, Northwest, Alitalia, Midwest, US Airways, United and Virgin America, and I've enjoyed all of them more than I enjoy my typical interaction with Continental. (Well, maybe not Alitalia.)

Posted by David Wertheimer at 12:24 PM | Permalink

• Neven Mrgan's tumbl
  Great, great summation of the ReadWriteWeb Facebook hoo-ha. "And you tell the carwash manager how unhappy you are...." (via marco.org)
  (tags: web sad)
• Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million
  Interesting stats in the article, including a nice new confirmation of the old 80/20 rule
  (tags: socialnetworking business)
• Sasquatch Poopship Avocado Ultramarine - emptyage
  If you're not careful, the Buzz-Twitter-Facebook recursion will make your head spin
  (tags: meta web socialnetworking)

Posted by David Wertheimer at 7:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

• Cool Betty White is red-hot - CNN.com
  Go Amy go! Continued congrats to her and Peter and Gian and Ian and the whole team behind the Snickers spot.
  (tags: advertising friends fun)
• Amazon.com: This Is a Test Product and Nothing Will Be Sent to You
  Naturally, it has 24 reviews
  (tags: web humor)

Posted by David Wertheimer at 7:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

• Motley Crue: Motley Crue : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone
  From 1994. Contains my favorite album review sentence ever: "This seventh effort's major innovation is the loss of singer Vince Neil and the arrival of his welcome replacement, John Corabi, formerly of the Scream (me neither)."
  (tags: music writing)

Posted by David Wertheimer at 7:03 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I am once again pleased as punch to report that my talented, hard-working wife has produced a commercial running in the Super Bowl, this time for Snickers.

The spot runs early in the game on Sunday, and there's a teaser on Facebook for the curious and impatient.

I will go on the record as saying I think the full spot is great: perfect for the Super Bowl. And I think I'm more proud and impressed than she is.

Update: Snickers topped the Ad Meter as best commercial of Super Bowl XLIV. Kickin'.

Posted by David Wertheimer at 11:21 AM | Permalink

• Monster Buys Yahoo HotJobs For $225 Million In Cash
  Farewell, HotJobs. Once upon a time, this was one of the biggest job sites on the Internet. I was flattered to have had the opportunity to work there briefly.
  (tags: internet news)
• AOL posts profit, but subscribers dwindle | Reuters
  What's crazy is that AOL still has nearly five million subscribers (including my in-laws, no matter how much I tell them they're paying twice with their cable modems)
  (tags: internet business trends)

Posted by David Wertheimer at 7:03 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

• WakeMate
  Bluetooth-enabled device monitors your sleep patterns, wakes you at the optimal REM stage. This is genius—I can always tell when I wake up at the "right" point in my sleep cycles. An alarm clock that ritualizes this for me may be worth 10X its weight in gold
  (tags: health gadgets)
• Blogger Buzz: Important Note to FTP Users
  Blogger shutting off FTP access for remote posting. This is fascinating to me--not long ago, FTP was really the only way to publish a blog to a personal domain. Fast forward a few years and 0.5% of Blogger's users are FTPing anything. Interesting shift in both Blogger's usage trends, and probably of the migration of domain-level bloggers switching to local install apps (MT, Wordpress) and then to remote services with auto-redirects (Tumblr, Typepad, and Blogger itself)
  (tags: blogs trends)
• Facebook | Jake Dobkin: From an Email to David Carr about The New York Times
  Jake Dobkin knows from chutzpah
  (tags: media blogs nyc)

Posted by David Wertheimer at 7:33 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

• Mike Arrington's Smartest Move Yet: Bailing On The CrunchPad
  This provides great perspective on the iPad. The startup making the JooJoo is creating an off-the-shelf Windows machine with a touchscreen for $499. That same price will now get Apple's polish and a unique user experience on a similar product. I know which one I'd buy
  (tags: gadgets)

Posted by David Wertheimer at 7:06 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm having a lot of fun helping Nate learn to speak and watching him communicate. One of his more perplexing pronunciations is "lion," which he learned perfectly, then switched to "liney." So I figured we'd work on it.

"Nate, who's that?" I said, pointing to his gold teddy-bear lion.

"Liney."

"Yes, but it's not liney, that's lion."

"Liney!"

"Nate, can you say lie?"

"Lie."

"Good! And how about yin?"

"Yin."

"Good good! Now say them together. Lie-yin."

"Liney!"

Posted by David Wertheimer at 9:52 AM | Permalink