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We have the two pugs and they are finally sleeping together on the dog bed after terrorizing each other and our pants for the past two days. We got Manju on Thursday morning and Leelin on Friday morning. Sarah got the day off on Friday because her program had determined that the huge snow storm, that turned out to be minor, would be cause to shut down the schools. So both Sarah and I were home to play with the puggies on Friday.

Manju managed the first damage in a drive by attack on me as I was drinking coffee on the couch with Sarah on Friday morning. Manju was running in and out of the kitchen and around the coffee table in the living room. We had gone to the grand opening of Finagle a Bagel in Coolidge corner and had brought back bagels because there was no point in eating them there with the bagel saw broken. I can only imagine how pissed the team at Finagle a Bagel were that the bagel saw wasn't ready for opening day. So we went home and made our own coffee to eat with the bagels. As I was taking a sip of my full mug of coffee Manju jumped into my lap grabbing my arm causing me to spill the hot coffee onto Sarah’s pants. Sarah shed her pants for the first time in the day to wash the coffee off. I tried to dab at the coffee with some wet rags to get it out of the couch.

We picked-up Leelin after we had finished our coffee. As we walked through the entranceway into the apartment he decided that it was the perfect time to poop. So we were relieved that he had pooped before reaching the door. We continued through our day to find a wet spot in the carpet that we assumed was one of the two pugs as they zipped around in circles so we pulled them into a time-out. Sarah caught Leelin trying to pee in the closet. He is the master of getting caught while trying to get away with an indoor infraction.

After taking the dogs for a walk we decided that they were smelly so we put them into the shower and sprayed them with the fancy massage shower head with the flexible hose. Sarah got them sudsy and then we tried drying them with towels as they kept escaping from the bathroom to roam about the apartment and shake off. We finally left them locked into the kitchen behind a card table secured from behind by a folding chair with a bass guitar amplifier to add weight. They had no problem breaking out of it.

Lisa and Dave were coming over to watch Rinaldo and Clara, the Bob Dylan movie. Lisa and Dave gave it to me as a birthday or holiday present. It doesn’t play properly on my television so they had brought their DVD player but even that didn’t solve the problem. We finally had to hook-up the computer in the living room to the television, which took a lot of rewiring to pull off in order to watch it. We watched it after eating a fettuccini and sauce (meatball for the meat eaters and vegetarian for Lisa). Robert came over too. As we were preparing for folks to come over and Sarah was lighting candles in the bathroom, a dangerous act I disapprove of, my Tigi Bed Head leave in conditioner bottle exploded. It covered her with hair gel including her pants causing her the second unplanned pants changing of the day.

Over dinner we chatted about the plan that Robert, Lisa, and Dave have hatched to unite the country. They plan to drive to every state on a tour. It hasn’t been announced yet but it should change the red and blue states all to a nice shade of purple by the end of the year. Robert came through with some great dessert and Lisa and Dave brought essential items including an onion, an avocado, and the pasta. The Pillsner Urquell from the beer fridge exploded on two out of four beers.

Rinaldo and Clara includes some very odd footage including a guy playing pinball and talking about writing Blowing in the Wind with Dylan. It also shows Dylan in a number of odd facial situations including the opening scene where he is wearing a clear mask and Dylan in white face as a protest against the incarceration of Ruben "Hurricane" Carter. During the movie Manju tried to pee on the carpet but I caught her just as she was about to go. I picked her up to show her my disapproval for the act and ended-up with a wet spot on my pants that people postulated was a delivery from Manju. That prompted my first and only pants change for the evening.

While watching with Dylan still in white face we heard a knocking on the door. The main person who knocks on the door is my upstairs professional complainer so I was worried about explaining the crew listening to weird Dylan scenes figuring that we could be carted off to some modern McCarthy-like anti government terrorist prison, but it was just Waichi.

Waichi had just gotten back from doing Tsunami relief aboard a Navy floating hospital, which meant that she needed her parking space back. We got her to sit and tell us stories about the trip including one about why it is bad to sleep on the top of the rack, the seventh bunk up because there aren’t any rails. So one of her co-workers took a spill off the top rack the first night and got hurt. She didn’t have good stories of misbehaving because the Navy has a strict anti-fraternizing policy. One almost fraternizing pair was whisked off the boat immediately. The trip back apparently also included some antics with doctors drinking all night long in Singapore and not being able to get out of bed to board the plane the next morning. The Navy has a picture of Waichi apparently before any fraternizing as she is saving a manikin. I let Waichi have my car to avoid having to drive it out to Newton for the night.

As we continued through the evening the DVD system in the computer was overwhelmed by Dylan’s antics so we had to switch to watching Garden State. To try to limit the pugs from causing further trouble we locked them in the bedroom and placed Manju into her crate. So throughout Garden State we could hear a steady scratching at the door as Leelin tried to escape. Garden State was pretty good. It was heralded as the best that Natalie Portman had ever acted. I had to agree but to step up from her other performances would be coming out of a deep cavern. She still can’t act but she got a good script with some funny scenes. It reminded me of Donnie Darko because it was so quirky, like having a scene where the main character awoke to find a knight in shining armor walking around, and people living in a boat at the bottom of a quarry.

When Sarah and I awoke this morning the pugs were working overtime to commit mischief. It was 6 am and they were playing with each other and barking. I finally got up to catch Leelin trying to poop on the rug in the bedroom and then found some fresh poop from Manju in the living room. They had given us the two poop morning salute.

I decided to get a haircut at Great Cuts because I was looking mangy. On the way out I made a pit stop at Finagle a Bagle to see if the bagel saw was finally running. It was chopping bagels at a record pace with a packed house of bagel hungry finaglers. At Great Cuts I finally decided that the right answer to the difficult hair question, which number should we use to clip the sides?, is 3. Some ten year old Russian kid was looking in a book to pick out his hair do and after ten minutes decided he wanted the same look as he currently had but shorter. His current look was to have a mop of hair on his head.

I grabbed a new issue of Barstool sports from a free newsstand by the T station. This edition was focused on Spring Break. By looking at the newsstands for the newspapers you have to pay money for I learned that Ty Law is gone for good from New England and that Bank of America lost a bunch of government people’s money. At least the pugs (terrorists) are sleeping for a while. They look perfectly cute and innocent. I’m sure that is what all terrorists look like when they are sleeping.

I found this by accident. I thought it was a good example of acronyms gone wild.

DiaRIAA - http://www.diariaa.com
* DiaRIAA exposes the abuse of power and folly of RIAA and the recording and movie associations and monopolies. DiaRIAA provides digital entertainment commentary, news, articles, and 1000s of links on consumer rights, innovation, technology, companies, and business models and strategies.

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I was tooling around at work today and surfing through utilities on Newsgator to try to expand my RSS vocabulary. I found a site called blog explosion that purported to be able to explode my blog traffic. I signed-up because I like the image of a blog exploding with words and pictures broken into crooked letters and tattered digital photographs strewn throughout a smoky urban cyber landscape. So far my blog hasn't exploded. But I will be keeping an eye on it from a safe distance in case it does explode.

I finally got someone to respond to my craigslist posting for another person to play squash with. The winner of the get a chance to play squash with a total amateur who needs more people to play against is Kelly. She has a boyfriend from MIT and just got back from a ski trip to Colorado. Hopefully we can play after the ski trip. I need to get into tip-top squash shape for the return of Dave as he has promised. He is planning on drinking lots of beer and not exercising for a month and expects that I should be good enough to beat him 50% of the time when he returns. The gauntlet has been laid.

I also finally returned my Blackberry to California leaving me with no more email on my hip. Jorey and I had dinner and we had some fun discussions about entrepreneurial endeavors. We did note that we all have lots of email addresses that we use and everyone knows the level of importance when you get a certain email. An alum.mit.edu email is good for a trusted friend and business confidant. Jorey and I can send those back and forth to each other. A companyyouworkat.com address means that you are establishing a real business contact that you intend to follow-up. For friends but not business contacts they can get your personalized me@myfullname.com address. Lower down the ladder are the yahoo.com, hotmail.com, and gmail.com addresses that are used depending upon the person for chat rooms, signing-up for suspicious spam offers, and people you don’t want to hear from again. When you get an email it is good to know where you stand on the email ladder.

I was also thinking about the growth of non-private information and social networking as I passed someone walking towards Zaftigs. I thought to myself as I passed that I could know so much about that person if I could identify their name, email, or cell number as we passed. I might be able to go into Friendster and see who I know who is friends with them, classmates to see if I was in the same school or know someone who went to my school who knew them, linkedin to see if I've done business with the person, some geneology site to determine if I was related to them or if I knew someone who was related to them. The links are almost all in place and with the right human computer interface I could have everything with a ping from a cell phone and a mining utility that hunted for the relationship between me and them. It does sound very much like a 1984 Big Brother style system that completely invades people's privacy but at the same time it is just saving time doing what people waste their time trying to do as they socialize with each other. Aren't a million people already keeping publicly accessible blogs and doesn't linked-in have a few million users?

Maybe in the future people will socialize and learn to live with this wealth of information about everyone that they meet being immediately available not just when they go home to look-up the information on their computer but as a real-time part of the interaction with a stranger. These tweens that are jabbering at IM all day with poorly matched CaPiTals are going to make the transformation from Olsen twins to college grads in the blink of an eye. For me it would be a great lubricant to remove some major social anxieties of meeting someone and not knowing who they are. I recently introduced myself to a key business contact at a potential partner using Linkedin. It felt normal and right to do so even for me, a relatively cautious networker.

So tonight I finished watching Ghost in the Shell. I had started the movie when Ami was over but I fell asleep. I started watching again before walking over to meet Jorey so my mind was filled with Japanese futuristic genetic cyborg psycho-babble. The imagery in the movie is amazing although it is hard not to chuckle at the poorly acted and possibly poorly translated weird Japanese cyber lingo. The vision is very similar to the information everywhere future that I am expecting in the not so distant future as wearable integrated computers connected to cell phones and PDAs are ubiquitous and easily connected to tools like social networking sites, RSS feeds, and organizers.

In the immortal words of the merged spirit of the Puppet Master and the woman cyborg known as the major at the end of Ghost in the Shell who had been reborn in the body of a young girl after the two perfect naked female bodies had been ravished by fighting, car accidents, and being blown to smithereens from the neck down by snipers in helicopters from section 9 trying to prevent project 2501 a.k.a the puppet master from reproducing in the Tokyo archeological museum:

"I understand it now and there are more words that go with the passage. These words are – When I was a child my speech, words, and feeling were all those of a child. Now that I am a man I have no more use for childish ways. Now I can say these things without help in my own voice because now I am no longer the woman known as the major nor am I the program that is called the puppet master. And where does the newborn go from here.... The net is vast and infinite."

On my way onto the subway today I picked-up the Metro to see someone with their picture on the cover listed as having died. The person looked vaguely like JR from the television show Dallas so I figured that another TV personality had run their course. But on closer inspection I saw that the name under the picture was Hunter and the page it referenced in the middle of the newspaper clearly stated that Hunter S. Thompson had taken his own life at age '67. I was shocked to read it and had an immediate emotional response. Lately I’ve been noticing a lot of the artists whose works I admire are suicidal. I was listening to INXS and pondering the end of Michael Hutchinson, and I keep stocking-up on Eliot Smith songs. I've always been a fan of Nirvana. It's a long list of folks who have decided to kill themselves. I can remember being in Las Vegas and reading Fear and Loathing out loud to Sarah by the pool of Excalibur, the annoying knights of the round table music in the distance, and trying to do my best Johnny Depp Hunter S. Thompson imitation. I read Hell's Angels while traveling throughout California visiting places like Long Beach where I could imagine Sonny Barger and his gang holding complete dominion. I only finally got through Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’73 during the height of the political race this past year.

His Gonzo journalism was absolutely astounding and led me to believe that any true, weird, and funny writing could be fun and loved by millions. His works were raw but perfect – better than one could hope to expose in a blog but written in a format that would easily have been adapted into an RSS feed consumed like a suitcase full of drugs at a police officer convention.

I guess he is done fearing and loathing.

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So I think I finally jumped through the necessary hoops to make the Sprint and Cingular folks happy with my phone port. People shouldn't be so surprised that we have to jump through so many hoops in life. Jumping through a hoop is the first thing we do when we are born. It just continues from there. I will know if the port was successful when I awake tomorrow morning. It is a little sad moving from a Blackberry to a normal phone again. I won't be able to obsessively check my email on my phone or try to write notes and thoughts on long car trips while driving. It will probably save my life or someone elses to not be typing and driving but I can always keep my old and mostly useless HP Ipaq handy to stay connected on the road. Maybe I can even configure the POP email on it but it doesn't have a keyboard and without a Velcro solution I don’t think I can accurately write using the pen based interface.

The past couple of days have been lazy. I have continued to attend ImprovBoston events as if I were a boxer training for a come back fight. I tried to do some musical improv last night at the open jam and was lucklessly given the style of ragtime. So I gave it a lame attempt, felt rather unfunny, and sat to watch other funny folks perform. The show before the open jam was amazing. They were reading excerpts from an unauthorized critical white house insider blog that I wish I could remember the name for, and then creating scenes on the fly with music in them. They were so professionally done that they looked scripted but they were all improvised on the spot. They were preceded by a group of New Hampshire college students that looked like the cast of That '70s show but didn’t have any girls or the foreign exchange student. They were pretty funny too. After the shows we went out with a bunch of Gadi's friends and played Improv games at the Druid with Gadi's three female friends as an audience. It was fun.

Hattie was annoyed that we had enjoyed ourselves without her so Sarah and I decided to put all plans on hold and do nothing that could be construed as fun. When I got home on Sunday night Sarah and I watched half of Without a Paddle. We were entertained by Bart the Bear, who had an extensive party including growling loud, eating Seth Green's cell phone, and causing Seth Green to roll around in the fetal position. We were joking that Bart the Bear(II) has been in a lot of movies. I did some research and it turns out that there are two Bart the Bears. The first one was born in Baltimore. His biggest feature role was in L'ours, that great French movie that was all about the life of a bear. He was also in The Great Outdoors, The Clan of the Cave Bear, Legends of the Fall, and White Fang. He died at age 20 at about the right age for a bear to die during the filming of Growing Up Grizzly, a made for TV movie where Bart the Bear II debuted in his acting career.

Today Sarah and I mostly were home chilling out. We cleaned and organized the apartment as the snow was coming down. We made it all the way in the snow to the Cheesecake Factory and to CVS to grab household items. We watched the end of Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 3. The finale in the last show is incredibly good. The season ends in a symphony of swears. If you can’t watch the whole season watch the last episode.

We watched Napoleon Dynamite after dinner. A lot of people warned me that it was an over-hyped piece of dung of a movie. I liked it as a creative look at folks with a guy cast as the main character that looked more like Beavis than anyone I had every seen in a cute but awkward love story. I liked it better than Ghost World. We had been thinking of going to the real movie theatre to see Life Aquatic or Million Dollar Baby but the plan evaporated as we got busy and our fear of the real movies sunk back in.

I have lots of fears of incomplete work on my conscience. I need to finish a press release. I never called some people on behalf of VMS. I didn't connect with Hattie on Friday. I still haven't figured out what we are doing with all the weddings this summer. I still haven't done the work to organize the future of my healthcare situation or become an individual corporation for consulting purposes. It is good to have some new hoops to jump through this week.

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On Friday night Sarah and I went over to Kate and Matt's for a poker night. We had eaten at Zaftigs at the bar where our waitress apologized for ignoring us every time that she came to do anything. We were watching the televisions trying to make sense of the Entertainment channel programming without closed captioning. We were coming from the Sprint store where I had gone on a mission to port my number again from the old ChannelWave to Sarah's Sprint account. The attempt to transfer the number is now well into it’s third week with little sign of a resolution in sight.

I began by getting a letter written from Peter that worked for John to transfer his number. Since the Sprint store is within walking distance we went there and they determined that Sarah could add me on her plan at no cost. All I needed to do was buy a new phone to port to which I did for $20. The phone was not going to port over quickly but when it didn’t transfer in three days as expected I returned to the store with Sarah again. This time I got a combination of the helpful person who had worked with me the first time and another man who was a new trainee. The trainee was about thirty years senior to the helpful kid who appeared to know everything about the operations of Sprint wireless. They are funny in the store because they don’t ever use a landline phone. Everything goes through the wireless phones. I had brought the letter again and they analyzed it called a bunch of people and finally resolved that everything was taken care of. This was on Monday and I was contacted by the Commerce5, formerly ChannelWave HR department, eagerly looking to wrap-up the telephone port. I told them it would only be a day or more then I could return the phone and declare the port complete but by Friday I realized something was not working right. So I went to the Sprint store before we went to Zaftigs for dinner and as I walked through the door I received a call from the Sprint porting center letting me know that the port had failed because the port didn't check-out through the Cingular porting center. I was in the Sprint store at the time but since they had finally resorted to calling me I tried to work things out on the phone. Unfortunately my only recourse was to refer the Sprint folks to the Commerce5 HR department, which they can’t call until Tuesday afternoon because of the long weekend. I am not that worried about it all because my phone is still working. I'll see what happens in the next few weeks. This reminds me of the Launch/Yahoo! shenanigans I had a few months ago trying to pay two dollars a month for Internet radio.

We got right to playing poker but because we are the bad news bears of poker we had to write the order of hands down again. We also had the wrong amounts of chips for the amount of money that we each put into the pot. This led to the realization three hours into the poker game that everyone, even folks who were losing their shirts, were "up" about three or four dollars. We also didn't do a great job of maintaining continuity during the hands because people kept disappearing during the game or wandering off to the bathroom. Sarah was sick with some stomach ailment and asked Matt for PeptoBismol. He didn't have any but instead collected his full complement of non-perscription drugs and offered them to us. We were playing with five people, the fifth being Meredith, Kate’s chef in training friend.

Meredith is currently working the pasta station at Olive's in the North End. The pasta station is low on the ladder but the foot into the door of the chef world. Everyone asks her to provide the pasta from her six burners worth of pasta and lets her know that regardless of how long it will be before they need the pasta that it will be two minutes before they need it. Meredith has been worried about the apocalypse lately due to the problems with mudslides and the tsunami. She even warned some of her friends about it. We discussed what you are supposed to do when the apocalypse is coming. Some ideas were to stock-up on duct tape, pray, build an ark, and figure out where the local fall-out shelters are located. Another idea was to bury a bus in the ground like the people did for the Y2K crisis. Meredith's cooking prowess got me very interested in the potential of a wicked good brunch the next morning. Meredith and the Kate and Matt team did make the brunch the next day using the money pooled from the poker game that everyone decided to contribute to the breakfast rather than cashing out. Sarah and I had thought we'd make it back to their place by ten but we made it over at 11:30 instead. During the prep time for the breakfast Kate was mentioning that we should all go to Mohican Sun to show off our new found gambling talents. She mentioned that she had been there to see DA-LEE. I assumed she meant that she had seen a Dali art exhibit but she clarified that she meant Dolly Pardon. Matt was busy trying to edit pops and squeaks out of a recording his uncle made of a vinyl album.

Matt and I had played squash in the morning on Friday before the poker game and I must continue to report that I lost to Matt three times this week. He beat me on three different occasions. I can try to blame the time he hit my head with the squash ball and caused me permanent squash brain damage but the real reason continues to be that I am terrible at squash and still have made no progress towards obtaining a respectable backhand. We played again after we ate the big brunch, talked more about movies, talked about the decorated gates in Central park, and watched the Sci-fi channel Raider's of the Lost Ark. Talk about the apocalypse. The end of Raiders is actually very funny because Lucas gives you the impression that there is a big warehouse full of these lost arks and similar relics where it was filed away as if the government gets about thirty of these lost arks of the covenant per week. I posted an ad on craigslist for more squash partners. Nobody has replied yet. I’ve found that craigslist is like a defective genie in a bottle. You can ask it for anything you wish for and you will usually get some bad facsimile of what you were looking for.

Last night I finally made it out to the Mainstage show at ImprovBoston. Before the show I ran into my old ImprovBoston classmates from a year ago who graduated five sessions ahead of me. They now have their own troupe and are performing on Saturday nights at 6PM. I gave them a hard time for not having put me on the mailing list to see them perform. Sharon and crew did a great job with the Mainstage show. The room was completely packed. Among the funniest gags in the show was one where one man was pretending to be an architect and the audience was asked about what he would propose for the lawn. The audience member suggested lawn gnomes. They then proceeded to transition into a scene where all of the cast were different lawn gnomes chatting during their daily work of standing around. It got me to thinking that lawn gnomes would be very popular among jews if they didn’t look so much like little Christian characters with their Santa-like hat. I could make a lot of money selling Jewish looking lawn gnomes, dressed in a traditional Chasidic outfit, talits, and a kippa.

After the show I went to a new wine bar called the Z bar that is an offshoot of the Abbey Lounge with Aaron, Mike, and a girl Aaron knows. Mike knows everyone at the Z Bar because he is friends with the owner. Aaron had gotten an acting job being a Russian who got shot through nefilm.com, a site where filmmakers post their wishes and get them fulfilled with some facsimile of what they were looking for. I’ll be looking for work there. I also might audition for the ad posted on ImprovBoston’s site regarding South City Theatre next weekend. Aaron's female friend was having a tough day including not having brought a coat out in the middle of winter, leaving her ATM card in the ATM machine. She mentioned that it would be a problem for her to not have income for a few weeks after she cancelled her card. She also had been enamored by an 18 year old Northeastern student/audience member named Madeleine was called onto the stage to perform with the troupe because it was her birthday.

Things have continued to go downhill in my technology world. At 2:00 when I got home last night the hard drive on my computer in the bedroom decided that it wanted to do it’s best jet engine impersonation.

Mack went missing the other day from my parents' house. These people at global pet finder need to get their product to market finally so we can start retrieving Mack. It looks like Sarah and I will have double pugs next weekend because both Alex and Stephanie are traveling and leaving us with their pug dogs. Leelin and Manju can finally have their Valentine’s day celebration.

Jorey and I have been trying to get together for about three weeks. He mentioned that he had felt violated by the blog but he clarified in an email when I asked him what he wanted me to change with this…

“if i wanted you to change anything, i would have already emailed. i'm
exaggerating when i say violated. i was just surprised. i did a search after your sister mentioned she had seen my name a bunch of times. not a big deal, but privacy is scary between blogs and camera phones. we're not going to see a 1984 version of big brother (unless you live in china); it will be more distributed than that. put that in your next blog. J”

My dream from last night:

I am at a person's house after a funeral where everyone is stolid and dressed in suits or black dresses but don’t know who the funeral was for. The house was by the ocean. I am babysitting the pug dog and someone lets me know that the dog has run away. I look around in the yard and notice he is playing near a hole, like something that a prairie dog would climb into. It looks too small for him but he climbs into it. I run to pull him out but when I do the hole keeps expanding inside and when I reach what seems to be living matter it is the bald head of a man below who is a fisherman that is working in his garden with a yellow rain suit on.

I fall through the hole into his garden and notice that the fisherman has an open well by his feet that the pug might fall into. He quickly fixes it by sliding a manhole cover onto it after I plead in a panicked request for the safety of the pug. I see the pug and chase it down. For a moment I think I am in the clear and ready to return the pug but upon closer inspection I see that what I have found is not right. The animal is instead a wind-up animatronic crablike animal.

I talk with the fisherman as we walk to a strange restaurant. The fisherman tells me to talk to his friend who can pick me up and take me back to the house. On the call I don't know where I am so I identify the name of the restaurant, which is a dingy Maine clam shack with picnic tables for outdoor seats. He knows the intersection immediately. Something odd where burly men in orange prisoner jumpsuits are rustling around is going on in the main shack/restaurant room behind the torn screen doors. Apparently the shack is connected through a back wall to the Shawshank prison. I talk to one of the escaped prisoners about life.

Two white stretched cars pull into the parking lot, one an escalade and the other a Cadillac limo. My family including my mom, Lisa, and my father come out and my mom is complaining that she doesn't need such luxury and the bar in the escalade made her feel uncomfortable. The cars were purchased because of money from a large bet that my family had made on the Patriots winning the superbowl. The pug dog jumps out and I run to him to greet him relieved that he is still alive. I am overwhelmed both as a caretaker and a friend. I get emotional and start to cry.

I see through an aerial view that most of the town are escaped criminals from the local prison in either orange or blue jumpsuits streaming out through the clam shack. The town fades into a farm of orange and blue ants.

I was looking to figure out the complex mess that is the Microsoft corporation with regards to marketing Viapoint given that I had been waiting about 8 minutes for the .NET Framework to install as I was switching PCs to this swank old computer so that I could donate my old computer to become a primary DNS server. I had gotten to thinking that if we need to make thousands of people wait eight minutes to install a bunch of Microsoft stuff then we should get some credit somewhere from the Microsoft folks. In my quick research I found this one page regarding the Microsoft buddy program that I thought might help me.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/isv/isvbuddy/default.aspx

So I've been assigned my very own Microsoft buddy. I believe his name is something like Sanjay Kumar but I haven't heard from him yet. I did get this lovely note from the web server letting me know that I can begin going on long walks in the park, learn how to tie knots, and play raquet sports with my new found buddy as soon as he contacts me. The whole idea reminds me of the Lemonheads song "I love my drug buddy".

She’s coming over, We’ll go out walking, Make a call on the way. There’s still some of the same stuff we got yesterday. There’s still some of the same stuff we got yesterday, Yeah.


The message from the buddy program is below.


Dear Dan Housman,

Congratulations! You have successfully registered for Microsoft ISV Buddy!

We are happy to have you as a member of the program. We look forward to creating an outstanding partner experience for you. Unless your new buddy is out of the office for some reason, you can expect to receive a welcome email from your buddy within one to two weeks. From that point you can begin ongoing communication with your buddy at a level that is comfortable for both of you.

If you need any additional assistance or have additional questions about the program, please contact us at budsup@microsoft.com.

Welcome to Microsoft ISV Buddy!

Sincerely,
The Microsoft ISV Buddy Team

In case you haven't noticed yet something is different about this page. It no longer is drab and grey and instead is drab and with blue links. Robert was over this evening and despite a total failed attempt to edit down the raw footage from Manufacturing Attraction, or installing necessary fonts to update the Off the Shallow End promotional post card we did manage to update the template for this page. Thanks Robert.

I also was entertained by Robert's string of emails with Alice regarding computer nincompoops. The only public evidence of this is the post he placed on craigslist as a component of their dialog. I would have copied the whole email string but I couldn't get my hands on it. Maybe Robert will post it in the comments area or something.

Here is the craigslist post:

Single White Geek Seeking Computer Illiterate Nincompoop


Spring is approaching and a curious character is looking to spend time outdoors with an adventurous female. All interested applicants should have a sense of humor and be light on their feet.

Cake eaters need not apply.

this is in or around Boston
it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

I had a dream the other day that Sarah was dressed in her outfit from the Halloween Swedish Nurse Pub Crawl. She was skulking around the city and I was trying to follow her. I was convinced that she out trying to cheat on me.

The highlight of yesterday was that Chris sent an email around to the ex-Channimals regarding a party that he is having to gather everyone together for one last party. If you happen to be an ex-Channimal drop me a line and I can forward you the specifics like where Chris lives and what day the event is on. I imagined that we could also have all the old and often quirky clients and partners attend this gathering but I think it will be limited to just the former employees.

Lately I have been inundated with racket sports. I am still trying to read Infinite Jest at a pace of about two pages per day. The whole book is obsessed with the details of what it is like to grow-up at a tennis academy. I tried to get away from tennis by renting Napoleon Dynamite, but I had gotten a mislabeled version of it that said it was in my plan when it really wasn't. So instead Sarah and I watched Wimbledon instead. It was a cute movie with a bit of humor. I wondered if the one scene where Kirsten Dunst is playing a game of mime tennis with her love interest main character guy was inspired by the mime-tennis game in Blowup by Antonioni.

With Falkoff in town I got totally schooled by the Falkoff's on Friday, Monday, and Tuesday at squash. I played Matt squash today and he beat me in a best of five set of games even though I was up 2-1 before we finished. I learned mostly that I have no chance of ever being good at any racket sports until I develop a backhand. Unfortunately I learned this same thing when I was 10 years old. When we finished Matt and I sat and chatted about personal injuries and getting old.

Matt has arthritis in his ankle that may have been due to an infection when he was a teenager. He then gave me a complete low-down on the dangers of rabies and how only 6 people have ever survived rabies once the symptoms began to show. He mentioned that a little girl was bitten by a rabid bat in a church and survived rabies after the doctors induced her into a coma. Both my parents keep getting rabies shots after rescuing dogs from each other. Why can’t most dogs be more like the pugs? They don’t fight or bite. Alex R. sent a pug Valentines Day card from Manju to Leelin asking if Leelin would be Manju’s Valentine.

In the shower this morning I thought that running a start-up/life isn't all that different from being in a Dungeon and Dragons game. You quest around with your crew of folks each with different skill sets looking for places to achieve experiences and funds. You meet challenges where you can lose hit points/cash and you can trade in those points for things you need to continue your quest to explore and dominate the dungeon (market) and tame those monsters (Customers) and enemies (Competitors) that you are involved with. It is a bummer that the world of computers can so easily replace those old story telling boards that classified people like me into the minority of 80's nerd kids. I wish I could just roll a 20-sided die one more time.

I thought this was pretty funny although it is true and relevant to my business. I am not sure which is my favorite holiday, Clutter Awareness Week or National Procrastination Week.

March is filled with "organizing holidays" -- "Clutter Awareness Week",
"National Procrastination Week", "Organize Your Home Office Day", "Clean Out
Your Closet Week" -- what are you doing to celebrate them? If you are hosting
a local workshop, seminar, volunteer project, or other event, let us know and
we'll post it on our calendar at http://www.onlineorganizing.com/CalendarMonth.asp
(along with a phone number, e-mail link, and detailed description of the event).
You may also submit calendar items to be included in future months.

Most people love to be creative and build their music, art, poetry, creative writing, software, consulting practice, children's toys, shareware, needlepoint, whatever. A lot of these people are my friends. I do think most people hate to do marketing instead of their artwork. This is what makes folks like me and Robert so bizarre. We actually like doing marketing as much as making things. It is fun for us to promote. For us marketing is making things. It is making a market.

I was looking at my stats charts for downloads this morning as I obsessively do each morning and because the chart for downloads is orange I got to thinking that marketing shareware is a lot like trying to build a campfire. Although in theory wood is flammable you can’t just grab a log and put a match underneath it to start a fire. The traditional way to make a fire is to start with the small kindling like little sticks, newspapers, and woodchips. This kindling is like the marketing to an initial group of people through easy to reach places like posting PAD files to all the shareware sites. The problem is that kindling isn’t a fire that will keep you warm at night or cook your marshmallows. Kindling is just a miniature fire and will burn out quickly if you aren’t careful. A full fire requires bigger wood to burn starting with the next size of wood including big sticks and small chopped logs. The rough equivalent to these are reaching more permanent and influential venues like magazine publishers, reviewers, and real users who tell their friends about the product. If you can get these to burn you may have enough flames to build the next level of a fire, which is the fire you set out to make in the first place so you wouldn’t freeze (or starve) to death in the first place. That is the big log that can burn for hours but also can put out the entire miniature fire that you managed to get buzzing. This big log is the market coming to you in a wave to let you know they are interested and want to be regularly reminded of what you have.

The problem with marketing shareware that doesn't work or isn't valuable to the users is that it is like marketing wet wood. If you can’t get folks to stand-up to realize that they are using the software and it is valuable to them then you can’t just pile lots of marketing stuff on top of the product and make it move. You also have to do a lot of wandering around in the woods to gather-up all the pieces of marketing kindling and small sticks that is time consuming. So recently we have installed bugzilla to track bugs and features to make sure we are getting the right stuff into the product, I am looking into making screen videos using Windows Media Encoder to highlight the product, and I would like to make case studies of how real users actually work with the product as a tool to become more productive in their jobs with a variety of jobs represented.

Getting that initial burst of fire has gotten easier recently with the advent of blogs, smarter search engines, and standardization among shareware sites – but that also means that everyone knows that there are good tools to use. At Viapoint we have been using the linking tools from any competitor or related products to find the links to them to identify who is paying attention to our category of products and then sending these people emails to inform them that we are a unique offering. At some point we will try to make this process work more automated through our own software. I also have been using some tools that come with a listing of all the shareware sites that accept PAD files and another one that lists all the sites and will simultaneously search the sites 60 at a time to display whether your product is listed in them yet or not as well as which version. The kindling part is quite easy actually and now as we work to move up to bigger chunks of marketing wood to light on fire like product announcements and real relationships with a dedicated group of press I am noticing that the kindling can quickly do what happens in a real fire if there is no next piece of wood to catch, it flashes hot quickly and then goes out. So we may need to kindle more than once to get the fire going.

I was never that great at building campfires. The last time I did build one I did it at a KOA campground in Acadia. We used a special fire starter log that still was difficult to get to work even though all the wood we were using came from a dry shed. We did eventually manage to get enough flames going to make some s'mores.

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I began this week on a mission to rescue a package from FedEx. Last week I had gotten notice that my Gyration mouse (inspired as a purchase from having seen one in action at Matt’s house) had been shipped to me through a nice Fed Ex package tag that provided a little box for me to sign to give the Fed Ex people permission to drop the box off in our entranceway. Since we have been hit with a rash of thefts of the boxes from doorways I was hesitant to sign it the first, second, or third day that the FedEx person came. So by Monday the box had been trapped in Needham in an office park waiting for me to pick-up this mouse. So on my way out to Burlington I went south instead of north and stopped in at the highly convenient office park in the middle of nowhere after searching for twenty minutes through back roads near some large car dealerships. I passed PTC headquarters, a building I have been to on a few occasions researching e-commerce through Oracle systems, and finally parked a mile and a half from the door to the FedEx building. Once inside this enormous building I came to a small mostly empty room with a single woman working in it with a customer ahead of me in line. On explaining to the woman my need to pick-up my package she let me know that the standard policy if you don’t claim your package is that they return it to the sender. She had processed mine a few minutes before and could rescue it from the void. She did so and I drove on with a gyration mouse in my car throughout the day until I brought it into the house finally on Thursday night.

On Tuesday night we had our weekly improv class at ImprovBoston. We mainly danced a lot to the song Blister in the Sun but we did do about an hour of Improv practice. I have become very irresponsible with my weekend Improv work as we are supposed to come to the shows on Saturday and go to the participatory shows on Sundays but I always seem to have my schedule pre-populated with events for Saturday and Sunday night without intending to do so. This Saturday and Sunday night I spent at Sarah's parents house and then at my parent's house – both of which were completely decorated for Valentine's day.

I am not normally a fan of Valentines day because I don’t think I look good wearing the color red. I also don’t like the corporate concept of the holiday. Throughout the week everyone on the radio was trying to sell me on the perfect Valentines day gift. The kind liberal folks at NPR let me know that with my purchase of chocolates for my girlfriend I could help pay for the news. Howard Stern tried to convince me that a Vermont Teddy bear is the perfect Valentines day gift. The folks on Sports talk radio took frequent breaks from expressing their happiness that the Patriots won the Superbowl to inform me that most women prefer a gift certificate for a spa day over a dozen roses. All of Target, a store that is already very red, tried to sell me on their Valentines day visions. They managed to hook in some school children who were running around the store with lists of the other kids they needed to buy valentines for. We were there to return three red throw pillows that Sarah had purchased and didn’t work with our sofa.

The worst offender of improperly pitching Valentines day purchases was the woman who keeps chiming in on the air that every kiss begins with Kays. That's about the dumbest thing I have ever heard. How and why would every kiss begin with cheap mall jewelry and if it is true that these folks at Kays are somehow involved in every kiss that I have I really wish they would just butt out of my life.

I spent a good deal of time talking to people and trying to categorize holidays by the colors that you are supposed to wear in order to determine if there is a blue holiday. Most people suggest Chanukah as a holiday to wear blue for but it is neither an all American holiday nor is it a holiday where there is a dress code.

So here is the codec for American holidays. Please let me know if I missed any:

Valentines day: Red
St. Patricks day: Green
Easter: Pastels (Pink, Blue, and Yellow)
Lent?: Black
4th of July: Red, White, and Blue
Halloween: Orange (Or Swedish nurse Red and white)
Christmas: Red and Green

I think blue might be recommended for Elvis day.

Sarah doesn't usually celebrate Valentine’s day and that is why we held our main Valentines day celebration a few weekends ago when the CVS stores first flooded with red heart shaped candies. Her mother does celebrate Valentines day by fully decorating her house for a day and inviting over the entire family to eat steaks (except for Christina who eats smart tofu dogs) at a table covered with Valentines day decorations and various chocolates. So on Saturday night we went out and ate steaks, I talked with Sarah’s dad about manufacturing pet video game products and became depressed to learn that it isn’t economical to manufacture anything that doesn't make at least $3 million in sales. We played Apples to Apples, a red and green game – preparing us for the upcoming St. Patrick's day. Just as we started playing the game I had a nice full bloody nose.

It looks like this year Sarah's Valentines day present is a cure for the red spots that have proliferated to cover her entire body as an allergic reaction to either the antibiotics that she took to cure her of strep-throat or the Omega 3 vitamins I started taking for my eyes. So far we tried Gold Bond Powder, Claritin, and Benadryl. We'll wait and see if it is German measles or not.

Robert told a joke this week at his new job. He didn't tell me the story but I did learn about it because when Dave and Lisa were performing at my mom’s party in Newton tonight they had some dead time where they needed someone to tell a joke to keep the party goers entertained. Robert had apparently been in a meeting at his new job and to acquaint him with the staff everyone had gone around in a circle and told a joke. He had asked to pass on telling a joke since he didn't know many but the group insisted that as a new employee he needed to tell a joke. So he finally resorted to a joke he had heard during his trip to India. The joke goes like this but was being told by Alice at the party, Lisa's dancer friend from Oberlin who had heard the joke earlier in the evening from Robert: "When the broom groom was told by the broom bride that she was pregnant he told her - We haven't even swept with each other yet!" That's almost as funny as a signature that I read from the bottom of an email that went: There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't. You can't tell that joke at a party because it only works in print. Another guy at the party chimed in "What did the Chicken do because it was cold? He was found with a cape on." Robert's joke hadn't impressed his new office pals much. I envision them as odd replicas of people like Hattie, me, and Peter but looking slightly different. Like the replica of me has a different color hair and a slightly wider face.

So I finally installed the Gyration mouse in the living room today after returning home from a full day of brunch with Alicia, Jon, and their two twin babies Chris and Elisabeth. I got to hold the babies and realized what I suspected about babies was true. They are heavy and I don’t have the proper muscles to hold them. I was much better at making omelets for brunch and watching the wedding video showing us the wedding that Sarah and I missed by going to celebrate my 30th birthday in Las Vegas. It wasn’t hard to install the mouse although it recommended plugging it in to charge for nine hours before installing it. I had plenty of time to do so because Robert, who I was waiting for, was late because he had to make an errand in Newton. He brought over the prototype for the card to advertise our Improv shows at the end of our class. The post-card draft features an obese woman in a red bathing suit by a pool. What I didn't realize was that Robert’s errand in Newton was to drop off his rent and visit my mom’s party and see Alice to tell her his joke. In all of our rush with the babies who had sucked most of our brains out by babbling to us all day, Sarah’s expanding red Valentines day hives, and brunch we had forgotten temporarily about the party at my mom’s house. Since Robert had come from there it was only fitting for me to rush back just in time to hear his joke.

I am a bit tired from running around all weekend and have a TGIM attitude heading into the week. I intend to try to avenge the terrible squash beating I took on Saturday morning when the Falkoff family decided again to take turns making me run in circles around the court for hours. With my luck and it being a red holiday I'll be drenched in blood by the end of the day.

Lately I have become obsessed with statistics that I can measure about progress. I think of it as goalitus or statitus. It began with looking at my web statistics for my personal site. I started checking daily and then more than once a day to see how many unique visitors had come to my site. I also check a couple times a week to see the geoloc tool on the site to see the map of visitors. I am apparently much more popular everywhere in the world but America and the only place in America where people read what I write are people living in and around Boston.

Now at Viapoint as the marketing guy I am obsessed with increasing the traffic and downloads for the product. Luckily the stats for Viapoint’s web server are only compiled once per day so if I look at them during different periods throughout the day I won’t learn anything new. I did manage to make one of the graphs spike by going on a 12 hour binge of posting PAD files to all of the shareware sites. A PAD file is an XML file you can put on your web server that describes everything about your company and software and you just tell the shareware sites to check it out and then you have a nicely formatted web page on the sites. One site suddenly boosted the download volume by about 75 overnight. Unfortunately I awoke today to find that the work only had a short-term effect on the stats since they were up for a day but they were starting to fall back down again already. My big hope with stats is to make them suddenly jump off the chart in a hockey stick. It’s a game to me.

Yesterday I went to check how much money I had made off of the advertisements that I put into this page. It is more than one buck but less than two. I’d buy a cup of coffee with it but they don’t give you any money until you make $100. I actually am not complying with their policy since I am not supposed to talk about the financial results of advertising through the adwords system.

I mainly put the adwords onto the site to see what types of products would be advertised in my little world. There are some weird ones that come-up. For example – today I am advertising for birdbarrier.com someone who has a solution to “pest starlings” and a lot of books and prints about Audubon. If I look at the post I made on satanic credit cards the page advertises for a bunch of credit card services. My post about Bush’s inauguration speech brings-up tools to find your old veteran buddies on military.com and militaryfriends.com. They are apparently competitors in the market for finding long lost military friends. Personally I would like to have a couple of military friends, just in case I picked a fight with a small sovereign nation. Ultimately the ads are somewhat useful to me. I could potentially recommend the bird barrier to Aaron to keep the starlings out of the building in Burlington.

All of this stat checking and PAD file posting had the side effect of running some internal drug in my system that has the rough equivalent effect of amphetamines. So I’ve been high as a kite on stats and PAD file checking for the past two days. The hypo-manic attitude may also be related to having a coffee maker running both at Viapoint and in Brookline causing my daily coffee intake to spike this week especially because after a long day of posting PAD files to shareware web sites you want to take a lot of little breaks to drink cups of coffee.

The irrational exuberance also might be related to having Improv practice on Tuesday night and having gotten really hyper during the class because we were testing out different pieces of opening music to get psyched-up to. So we were bouncing off each other for an hour listening to AC/DC, Blister in the sun, and all sorts of get psyched up songs. I finished the improv class with a sketch where we were all hunting in a field and we decided that we needed to kill all of the crazed bloodthirsty Easter bunnies. The solution to the get rid of the bunnies that we resolved was to go after their eggs. Eventually we found one egg that looked particularly dangerous and got into a disagreement regarding who needed to open it. I was out because I had sat on Santa’s lap a few months back during the elf hunt. The egg exploded and the scene ended.

I happed upon the site www.gizoogle.com today. It will translate any site into street speak. I tested it on my last entry from Wendesday when I was flaming about the Boston police department. This site is a full thirty seconds of fun but it is a fun little algorithm for converting intelligent thoughts like mine into silly unintelligible street speak. Actually I was hoping it would translate my thoughts from unintelligible stream of consciousness into something that Tom Wolf might write. The results look like this.

Police break up MIT fizzle party, found alcohol

Ami n I were chillin' as we wizzle dippin' at Stizzop n Shop fo' our salmon dinna components. Ami noted that brotha we have a war on sum'm sum'm like tha war on drugs, tha war on terror n we decide ta call it a war it really isn’t a war. But whiznen we hizzle a real war where thugz fight against an enemy wit baller n weapons tha politizzles don’t cizzay it a war cuz its a G thang. We call real wars conflicts n operations . know what im sayin?. Now there is a new war in Boston thiznat I fizzle close to in tha hood. It is tha war on red plastic cups. As I was heezeeing towards tha elevator ta tha meet'n today at VMS I looked dizzay ta see MIT's newspapa, The Tech droppin hits. The top said "Patriots Win tha Supa B-to-tha-izzowl" so I tizzle a look at it. In tha left hand column they flashed a heezeeline story wit AEPi listed in tha heezeeline. I looked dizzown ta find "Police Broke Up AEPi Party, Found Alcohol" was a lead story . Real niggas recognize the realness.. (I would link ta it but I don't hizzy it electronically yet - It was in tha Globe written by Suzanne Smalley n should be in The Tizzech archives shortly) in tha hood. Apparently tha Boston Police department has been asked ta crizzay dizzy on drunken students due ta tha incident wit tha Emerson student Victoria Snelgrove who they shot n iced wit riot control bullets dur'n an inappropriate celebrizzles by drunken college students who mistook themselves fo' elderly citizens who hadn't seen a world series win since 1918 whiznen tha Sox bizzy tha Yankees fo' tha ALCS in Kenmore square. It also may go bizzay ta wizzle a Northeastern student died dur'n a celebrizzles W-H-to-tha-izzen tha Patriots won they fizzay Supa Bizzowl n could go bizzay ta when an MIT student died of an alcohol overdose a few years prior.

Ami and I were chatting as we were shopping at Stop and Shop for our salmon dinner components. Ami noted that whenever we have a war on something like the war on drugs, the war on terror and we decide to call it a war it really isn’t a war. But when we have a real war where people fight against an enemy with borders and weapons the politicians don’t call it a war. We call real wars conflicts and operations. Now there is a new war in Boston that I feel close to. It is the war on red plastic cups.

As I was heading towards the elevator to the meeting today at VMS I looked down to see MIT's newspaper, The Tech. The top said "Patriots Win the Super Bowl" so I took a look at it. In the left hand column they flashed a headline story with AEPi listed in the headline. I looked down to find "Police Broke Up AEPi Party, Found Alcohol" was a lead story. (I would link to it but I don't have it electronically yet - It was in the Globe written by Suzanne Smalley and should be in The Tech archives shortly). Apparently the Boston Police department has been asked to crack down on drunken students due to the incident with the Emerson student Victoria Snelgrove who they shot and killed with riot control bullets during an inappropriate celebration by drunken college students who mistook themselves for elderly citizens who hadn't seen a world series win since 1918 when the Sox beat the Yankees for the ALCS in Kenmore square. It also may go back to when a Northeastern student died during a celebration when the Patriots won their first Super Bowl and could go back to when an MIT student died of an alcohol overdose a few years prior.

The new plan to cut down on such incidents is called Operation Student Shield. This plan involves looking for students on Bay State road drinking from red plastic cups and carrying cases of beer. On Friday night the first group of people to get stung by the prohibition style witch-hunt was a small Jewish fraternity that when I went there sported the highest GPA of any independent living group on campus and was also full of very nerdy folks. The police saw some people drinking outside from the tell tale red plastic cups and when they went to the door found more suspicious people drinking from the same red plastic cups.

The reported news contained what appears to be what I would expect to see in a Vatican newspaper.

"When the detectives entered the basement they saw about 40 young men and women, many of whom were drinking from red plastic cups and appeared to be underage."

Now first of all I lived at 165 Bay State Rd. where this occurred and the basement is a small room no bigger than my living room. In it is a bar that we built like most fraternity members do accompanied by a stereo system. A group of 40 people would be normal for a Friday night and would barely constitute a party. A party would be held in the main house at 155 Bay State Road that has a full brownstone floor with grand fireplaces and three rooms to party in. What the police must have found was just a bunch of students relaxing and drinking on a Friday night. In the case of responsibility AEPi did get in trouble once a few years ago when an underaged drinker was feeling sick and appeared to be passed out. Rather than rushing her out of the house to avoid liability the leadership at AEPi took responsibility and called an ambulance and the police to help her to safety. This is the responsible thing to do and not something to be punished for. The result was that the fraternity was punished in various ways for having an alcohol violation. What is important? Student safety. How do we get it? Make the students afraid to ask for help from the police.

"Boston Police called MIT police to help inspect the fraternity house where
officers found a bar containing dozens of bottles of rum, vodka, and other
liquors, as well as three Bud Light containers holding about five gallons of
beer apiece."

Why did the Boston Police trying to crack down on problems at riots after sporting events caused predominantly by BU, Emerson, and Northeastern students raid a nerdy Jewish MIT fraternity? Why did they need to have support from the MIT police to search the house? My guess is that this wasn’t a completely random event where the Boston Police found people drinking out of red plastic cups. I think they were looking to go after an MIT fraternity because they wanted to show they were doing something but didn’t want to draw the heat and wrath of the student populations from the real Boston schools. So they picked an MIT frat. I don’t think there was intent to target a specific ethnic group. That would just be a shit storm so I doubt it.

"Near the bar, detectives also found evidence of the drinking game beer pong.
Boyle said. There, several pitchers of beer and plastic cups filled with beer
littered a table top."

I have to laugh at the word detectives in this context. How much detective training did they have to go through at detective school where they were probably playing beer pong at the same age as everyone else, before they could develop the skills to identify the key evidence needed to indict people for playing beer pong. The notion of beer pong as a crime is ridiculous. I took a photo of some of my depraved 28-31 year old friends playing beer pong before the Snow Ball at Jeff’s house. Is beer pong now a violent practice similar to cock fighting and child pornography that must be stopped at any cost? Do I need to worry about protecting the identities of these lawless characters that I know? I have to wonder why the Police don’t go door to door from one fraternity to the next on Friday nights to see who is playing this game and drinking. My guess is that 9 out of 10 ILGs are playing beer pong somewhere every Friday night and that the one that isn’t is on a field trip playing beer pong at another ILG for the night.

"Detectives also found an industrial sized vacuum cleaner blocking one fire exit
and another exit that was locked."

So now that these detectives were let loose in the building with a warrant to review the source of the red plastic cups they also decided to investigate the suspicious fire exit violations. I lived at 165 Bay State Road and if there was a locked exit it was probably a good thing. My bike was stolen out of the basement one day so it would make sense to lock the doors. Also, what does it mean that a fire exit was blocked by a vacuum cleaner. I can't imagine how the police plan to use this in court. This is obviously a group of criminals that need to be evicted. They own a vacuum cleaner that is so large that it blocks exits.

"Boyle said it was issued a licensed-premise violation and representatives will
have to appear in court for serving alcohol to minors, keeping and exposing
alcohol, a locked fire exit, and a blocked fire exit. Boyle said criminal
complaints against the keepers of the fraternity house will be sought in Roxbury
District Court this week."

Remind me what country are we living in? Where and how do we vote these idiots out of office? Why are they harassing the nerdy MIT kids who spent their whole childhood hiding in fear of the cool kids who were smoking pot and drinking all week and finally are getting a brief chance to bud into social human beings. The police intend to take these kids to court and hold them on these bogus charges of keeping and exposing alcohol, locked fire exits, and blocking fire exits. I find it hard to express my extreme disappointment with the Boston Police's solution to their own ineptitude. Go pick on the BU and Emerson students. Go fight crime somewhere.

I have a whole bunch of red plastic cups in my cupboard from drinking for six hours before and after Patriots games where it is apparently considered custom for 60,000 people all driving cars to and from the stadium to get totally blitzed. I am considering switching to blue cups. The cops might like those better.

The new carpet appeared today. Sarah had lugged it home and up the stairs on its own and even rolled it out onto the living room floor. It is a white shag carpet. I knew it would be a magnet for stains so I was trying to be extra careful to not do anything stupid with the green guacamole that I was munching away at while we watched the Seinfeld season 1 DVD. I also was careful not to spill my orange macaroni and cheese on the fresh rug. But in an effort to avoid hitting the guacamole or the mac and cheese, I swung my arm into my full glass of brown apple cider and watched it pour over the counter of the coffee table and on to the new rug. Since much of the cider was spilling over the side of the coffee table I tried to hold on to it by cupping my hands underneath the flowing streams to catch what I could before the cider waterfall reached more of the floor. Sarah came back in what seemed to be about an hour with a hand towel and a roll of paper towels. We scrubbed the new rug with the paper towels to absorb the cider until it felt like we were getting diminishing returns.

When Ami, our houseguest, returned from his trip to see his family I explained to him about the situation and the problem. We got to talking about how interesting it would be if people made crop circles in their carpets as though the little aliens from Batteries Not Included had landed and wanted to be seen. I started to post it onto halfbakery.com and when I did I noticed that someone had posted the same idea of carpet crop circles just today. Imagine both me and Ami and this Desert Fox character all converging on having and posting this stupid idea at about the same time. Maybe the aliens are really entering into everyone’s mind that we should have crop circles on our carpets.

Sarah and I watched Scary Movie 3. It is the more likely cause for the sudden interest in crop circles. It had a lot of scenes focused entirely on crop circles to make fun of the movie signs. The best one was in the beginning of the movie when the main character is interested in doing a story on the crop circles and tries to explain to her boss, the executive in charge of the content for the station that people don’t want to see breasts, sex, and violence but instead need hard hitting facts, real journalism, and … .and ….and TWINS! (The whole office then busts into a great imitation of the Coors lite ad.)

Splat. Dang. Blat. The story of the bat.

On Friday afternoon as the day was beginning to wind down at Viapoint headquarters Aaron walked into my office to ask me if I had heard it. At first I puzzled as to what I was supposed to have heard but in moments it became all to clear that above me in the ceiling tiles was a scurrying and living thing scraping along the ceiling tiles above us as it meandered from room to room looking for a way out. My first instinct was to leave for the day since it was Friday and let Aaron and Chris fend for themselves with the beast. But since I am a reasonable person I instead stuck around doing work to hear it wander about. I recommended that we could lay a trap for it and if it were a large rodent or raccoon that it could be captured and released. I was making a ruckus above us and was able to traverse three rooms seemingly in an instant. That led me to the conclusion that there was a family or an entire armada of these evil beings living in the ceiling waiting to thrust their way down through the fiberglass tiles to reach a hungry alien claw down to snatch me up and eat me for a late afternoon snack. Chris managed to confirm that the beast or beasts were dinosaur-like in fashion with a clear long beak that had protruded down in an attempt to thrust it’s head into his office.

Finally the animal broke free from the large crawl-space cage and the entire Viapoint animal removal unit sprung into action to attempt to free a very agitated European starling from the office. European starlings are not the most loved of birds among ornithologists of the area and I am inclined to agree with them that they are vicious and cruel bloodthirsty creatures with no redeeming quality even as a dinner in a Brittish pub. If you have ever had a birdfeeder, as my family did in Newton, you come to dislike certain breeds of birds for their ability to drown out all the other breeds of birds. Among the nasty birds are pigeons, blue jays – nasty little f*&#%ers, and the European starling. The starling is not a native bird as is suggested by the European attitude and like many Europeans they have a really bad attitude. They tend to colonize large areas and kill native populations. Imagine the Brittish and Spanish knocking out the native Americans. That is what the Starling does to native populations of birds. They are also not very attractive birds. They have an iridescent black coat that looks like they emerged from an oil slick.

So this particular Starling was swooping about in the office trying to peck out the eyeballs of the architects and brain trust behind of the best smart organizer (www.viapoint.com) on the planet. My main role was to hunch down and duck for cover as though I was under mortar fire in Iraq and scurry into my office to grab my digital camera. Aaron was hard at work opening the window in his office. As I took hold of the Canon Powershot Digital Elph S400. I ran to Aaron’s office to hear the door slam in my face. Hector, the heroic Starling had flown into his office and Aaron had decided to act alone to defeat the beast alone with the door closed. So I was stuck with a camera and a closed door hearing screeching, screaming, cawing, and Aaron inside and I was wishing I could report effectively on this defining moment in the start-up venture. By the time I got the courage to burst through the door with the camera ready to document the event Hector had flown into the wilds of Burlington.

This story would seem to be an incident unique to Friday but I first learned the power of the Internet one dark night in Cambridge when Ron and I were living and working at 930 Massachusetts Avenue. I was sleeping in the upstairs apartment and Ron was up late trying to program a statistics package for VirtuMall so that we could calculate and report how much traffic had come to the site. He ran excitedly up the stairs to awaken me from a great dream as I was sleeping in my tightey-whitey underwear because it was the heat of a summer night. Ron was petrified and breathing heavily because there was a bat on the second floor flying in eery silent circles. Because I am larger than Ron and older by a few years and my family owned the house Ron elected me the chairman of the bat removal organization.

Now we realized that we couldn’t just go down with our skin all exposed to a potentially rabid bat since we didn’t want to get rabies and since none of the other employees were in the office as it was the middle of the night there was no problem wearing whatever outfit we saw fit to wear. In our case we first worried about our legs. Ron chose to wear a robe tied at the waist. I wore a long sleeve shirt and a towel tied around my waist. The next key body part to protect were our faces. To protect my face in the basement I found a reflective metallic firefighters asbestos soft hood that looked like something out of a B-horror movie like the robots in The Day The Earth Stood Still. Ron wore a black and orange striped ski-mask. We locked ourselves in the second floor to do battle with the bat. Our weapons of choice were open windows, an open fire escape door, a large piece of cardboard and a broom handle.

The bat spun around the house at top speed for about fifteen minutes and we would yell loud noises at it hoping to disrupt it’s sonar and direct it to the open door. When that didn’t work we tried using the cardboard card by pushing it up when it seemed to be going in the wrong direction to trick it into turning around to go back to the doorway. The broomstick was also used in an attempt to hold up the card at one point then was relegated to mere waving like an old lady with a cane who has been splashed by a passing car as the bat passed from room to room. The bat grew tired of this activity after about fifteen minutes and decided to rest on the edge of the open door to the outside world.

We quietly snuck up to it with the broomstick while it was resting and paused to make a plan. At this point I finally got a chance to see a bat up close and it has a very human or monkey-like face. It looked at me with it’s little eyes without much fear while wrapped in it’s web-like wings. We decided our best bet was to nudge the bat with the broomstick because it would likely understand that as a cue to awaken and fly out the window.

So as I pushed the broom handle into the bat it did awake and it let out a bit of a squeak that was enough for me to panic in fear that it was going to come at me and strike. So I pulled back the broom handle only to see this bats mate fly through the open door full of vigorous energy. So rather than having removed the first bat Ron and I were faced with two bats actively flying about in the second floor with the prospect of more bats to come.

At this point in time we weren’t particularly entertained by the rapidly multiplying bat population and it wasn’t the first time we had dealt with wild animals in the house at 930 Mass Ave. Only a few months before we had been treated to a large raccoon the size of an eight year old child that was happily munching on waste from a failed attempt to make Pad Thai (too spicy due to a massive dose of unneeded jalapeno peppers) our garbage can full of food in the third floor apartment. The raccoon had been easy to get rid of. We just needed to yell at it for about half an hour with low menacing voices. The same technique was only making the bats seem like we were in a scene in the middle of gremlins II. I expected one of the bats to start talking to me with a Brittish accent.

After conferring with each other Ron and I decided that our MIT educations had not prepared us in any way for this eventually of death by bat infestation so we felt that it was time to confer with the outside world. So we called the animal control department in Cambridge hoping that they could send a bat removal S.W.A.T team that would descend from the roof and throw large nets around the bats. As it was 2:30 in the morning the bat removal S.W.A.T team was apparently fast asleep after having watched Conan O’Brien. We probably only missed them by a few minutes. So I went to the next best thing. I called my dad. He was ecstatic that I had called him at 2:30 AM and after groggily yelling at me for waking him up he offered this great piece of advice. “Go to sleep. If the bats are still there tomorrow morning then you can do something about it.” I informed Ron that the advice from the best expert on the matter had been to let the bats exit on their own but he was not ready to concede to a growing colony of bats invading the 2nd floor and claiming it as their own new Cambridge residence. We did live like cave men but the cave didn’t need to come fully stocked with bats.

So Ron did what I found to be the most ingenious example of the power of the Internet to change human lives. Ron searched the Internet using Alta-Vista for the word “Bat Removal”. Through this search he found a site from a zoo in Florida that described for curious tourists learning about those wonderful insect eating bats how to remove them from your home. The instructions boiled down to this. Bats when they get tired will perch on a wall to rest. When they are on this wall they are quite docile and can be removed by taking a coffee tin and a piece of cardboard to trap behind them. First you cover them with the coffee tin, and then you slip the cardboard behind them. You can then safely remove them from the house and release them back into the wild.

While most people drink coffee prepared from a tin, my preference had been to go to the 1369 Coffee House or Au Bon Pain down the street. Thus we did not have a coffee tin. Cardboard was not handy either. So we improvised with a piece of Tupperware and an LL Cool J album cover. We had a brief board meeting for VirtuMall and Ron elected me the chief bat removal officer so I had to walk over to the bat with the Tupperware in one hand and the album in the other, still wearing the silver fireproof helmet.

I covered the bat with the Tupperware which went fine. When I then slid the record over it the bat decided that it would prefer to be flying around the second floor instead. But it was trapped in between and ready to be nicely released into the wild. The bats impression was that his best bet was to claw and flap inside of the Tupperware and make evil screaming sounds as I rushed down the stairs to the first floor to the door. He decided that there was a small gap in between the two objects that he could widen with his bat claw so he slid his claw up through them into my world slowly reaching more and more of his webby arm out to grab my fingers with his claws. This action caused me to rush even faster out the door because one chink in my otherwise bat proof armor was that my hands were not protected. Ron held the door open and I threw Tupperware, bat, and record out the door for them to all separate and fall onto the ground together figuring that although I didn’t want to kill him, he would be free to kill me if I waited another few seconds. Ron slammed the door behind him.

A few minutes later Ron wanted to check if we had a dead bat on the front steps. He opened the door and walked out into the warm night air. He saw the Tupperware and the record on the ground but no bat was to be seen. The suddenly the bat swooped down right in front of his face and looked him in the eye while floating just to give Ron one last spook to declare his disappointment at his eviction.

After all this excitement Ron and I decided to heed my dad’s advice and let the other bat escape on his own. By morning it was gone but we still don’t know if it really left or if it is still in residence somewhere in the roof.

On Sunday the Pats played and won the Super bowl against the Eagles. Just before the game, as we were watching in my parents attic I heard the rustling of squirrels living in the crawl space in the roof who were probably excited that they could watch the game through a peephole and gorge themselves on chestnuts and acorns gathered from the fall.

The basics are clear. Bats, starlings, raccoons, squirrels, and all the other critters that like to come in and visit us unannounced make for interesting times, strange wardrobe choices, and are an integral part of running a zero-stage start-up.

My credit card statement according to Citibank today was as follows:

Balance Notification

Dear DANIEL HOUSMAN,

Acct#: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Your Citi card current account balance is approximately $666.66 as of the time of this notification. For more account information, to request a Credit Line Increase, or make an online payment, go to www.citicards.com .

I will ignore this little wierd omen and root hard for the Pats.

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Life is full of hidden doors that mark beginnings and endings of opportunities and time. Some doors are entrances and others are exits. Yesterday was my last day at ChannelWave. It was an exit I had been anticipating for a long time.

They finally tore that old house down on St. Paul just before you reach Longwood. It was an old and spooky house and looked like it should have been torn down a long time ago. It was missing on Monday after being totally leveled by a big yellow iron monster that was standing proudly in front of and atop the piles of shattered wood on the ground.

On the official ChannelWave EXIT INTERVIEW CHECKLIST the dates of my employment at ChannelWave are listed with a start date of 1/19/1996 and the last day worked as 02/02/2005. I logged an employment period that spanned from start-up concept cradle to asset sale grave. During those nine years I nurtured a baby ChannelWave into existence, watched it grow customers, employees, products, culture, and space. I watched the baby ChannelWave stumble and move towards my own dreams of what it could become and then saw it weaken in the face of faults, limitations, and gaps. Eventually I watched it become an empty and hollow corpse of a company that first was put onto the life support of an acquisition and then finally lurched passively towards the grave of a final asset sale to a public company.

ChannelWave was the logical extension of a dream I had at MIT to start a restaurant with interesting and eclectic tables shaped like oranges, basketballs, and other odd items. I figured I could make creative tables after building what was called the reality proof chair out of an old printer noise cover that I found in the hallways of MIT marked as garbage and a lot of plywood shaped in the wood shop. The original locations that I had scouted for my restaurant were in Kenmore square. One location would eventually become IHOP (International House of Pancakes) and after that it would become the new hotel above the Kenmore T station. The other idea for a location was where the Landmark Center now is. Back then it was an abandoned Sears building. I finally settled on the basement of a house that my family bought on 930 Mass Ave. in Cambridge for the objective of more than one of us to start a business and as a real estate investment. Jeremy and I gutted the office like basement of the house by ripping out a drop ceiling to expose the wooden beams, installing tiffany lamps, painting the walls a southwestern brown and blue, building simple round tables out of wood, and laying halogen track lighting through the ceiling pointing to a stage at the front for performers. The restaurant was incorporated as The Door in the Wall Inc. I named it after The Door in the Wall, one of my favorite stories by H.G. Wells. It is about a man who passes by a wonderful garden with a beautiful woman a few times in his life but never enters. To me it was about missing opportunities and taking advantages of times.

The ending lines of the Door in the Wall:

"You may think me superstitious if you will, and foolish; but, indeed, I am more than half convinced that he had in truth, an abnormal gift, and a sense, something--I know not what--that in the guise of wall and door offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape into another and altogether more beautiful world. At any rate, you will say, it betrayed him in the end. But did it betray him? There you touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination.

We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger and death. But did he see like that?"

The Door in The Wall cafe was never completed. Instead I moved into the building with Ron and started VirtuMall, an online shopping mall, then VirtuFlex a development tool to make dynamic web sites, and then VirtuMedia, a consulting company building dynamic web sites, finally evolving into ChannelWave around 1997.

I remember a lot of last days for other people who were Channimals that came and went with much fanfare during the Internet bubble period and even through hard long declining years. We had parties and gatherings to say goodbye to important people as they left like Jeff Durand, Jack Connors, Tibor Vais, Drew Williams, Stephanie Lin, Bob Orr, Gary Howard, Chip Greer, Bob Guillocheau, Ron Schmelzer, and Rhea Plosker. During the big lay-offs we had gatherings with crying, hugging, and drinks. The goodbye parties shrunk as fewer people were around and as budgets shrunk to pay for wishing our parting partners towards their next great success. I am sorry I can’t list all of the people whose names I have escorted into our doors and then out with their EXIT INTERVIEW CHECKLIST with a drink in one hand, some snacks, chicken wings, and speeches. Maybe we can have a party some day with everyone.

I should have known the last time I wished someone goodbye what things would be like on my last day. During various times I had envisioned a last day at ChannelWave the way that every person envisions their own funeral. Chris and Ron would make speeches about the time I had woken-up in the middle of the night to get coffee and had forgotten that I had driven to 7-11 and walked back only to think my Volvo was stolen the next day. Some people would tell about how I had been inspirational to them in Chatham when I urged the management team to have faith that our worst hours are always before our brightest dawns. Others would cheer me. Some people like Alex would quietly thank me for helping them get a Green card and for keeping the company long enough for them to have the opportunity for their family become an American citizen. Some people would just let me know that I had been the soul of a machine that they had been happy to take a ride in. At some point after everyone was sufficiently drunk people would hold me in a chair above their heads and dance to Havana Gila.

I had taken Hattie and Rhea out to Cuchi-Cuchi the day after Rhea had moved on. She had been tired of commuting back and forth and she was relieved to start her life back in Toronto again without the weight of ChannelWave behind her. There were only three of us there then.

I was chatting with the asset management guy from the acquiring company who thought that the PCs were of no real value and was looking to give them away to a school or whoever would take them. He figured nobody would want the cubicles. I had always protested cubicles. I wanted things to be open air so that people could see and trust each other. The cubicles will outlive the move when the lease runs out in June. The asset management guy is just going to leave them there.

I cleaned out my desk as best as I could for a half day. I had been keeping personal financial statements in the desk like my old bank statements, stock transactions, and old checks. I had checks from BayBank. In those nine years Bay Bank had become BankBoston and then BankBoston had become Fleet and now Fleet has become Bank of America. I shredded five generations of blank checks in Trey's office. He had a shredder that he had found when Susan, a lawyer, had been let go. I liked to think I might actually be shredding something of real value, like I was at Tyco or Enron, racing to destroy evidence of some accounting scandal. Shredding can be fun and cathartic. I wasn't erasing anything but records that I was here.

I had been locked out of the email system as though I might steal something from the corpse of my own company. I had Peter request that I have my email still on for the next 30 days so that I could transition the many personal things that are intertwined with my existence with ChannelWave. I had become for some years, maybe the first five, integrated as a single being with the company only to slowly fade back into a living person again. It is a mess to clean-up.

My secret utopian experiment had been to build a company less like Dilbert, a company that had learned from the book Catch-22. What Would Yossarian Do (WWYD)? People would be valued and it would be a place where people wanted to be. We were going to be a family at any size that trusted each other. We would electrocute our guests with the synergy emanating from our hands when we greeted them. This experiment failed like so many other efforts to create a better world in a little microcosm. Before only a few years had pass