We hit the road for the east coast in the morning, visiting my parents in Avalon, New Jersey (on the shore). Can’t wait, I hear the water’s warm and it promises to be sunny almost the entire week.
No blogging until I’m back. Something tells me you’ll manage.
Wow — just updated my Treo with the updater for my Cingular Treo 650 and the results are pretty incredible. Available memory on the phone went from 4 megabytes to over 10 megabytes, thanks to the changes in the Palm file system). What does that mean? In the old filesystem, files took up a minimum of 512 bytes (even a one byte file would occupy a block of 512 bytes, leading to lots of “dead” space). In the new filesystem, the minimum block size is 32 bytes, meaning that the new Treo uses its memory much more efficiently.
It also claims improved voice quality and improved battery management; I’ll test those out and see if I notice anything.
It started harmlessly enough: giving a speech in front of a room of 400 attendees, my tongue hit my teeth just right. Though I’d had braces as a teen, my teeth had spent the last ten years on an inexorable march towards overbite, overcrowding and, well, chaos.
Of my front four teeth on the bottom, one had fallen so far forward that the other three had lined up behind it, with a narrow gap between them. Just enough of a gap, in fact, that when my tongue hit them, air rushed out below my tongue and through my teeth, sounding like a whistle and a lisp at the same time.
Turns out my problem wasn’t just my bottom teeth; I’ve had braces since December, 2003 and the changes are remarkable. (This is my second pass with braces: I had them as a teen, though that clearly didn’t quite do the job.)
My visit to my orthodontist (Dr. Hertzberg in Naperville is terrific) tonight confirmed what I was hopeful (desperate?) for: they’re coming off next month. I can’t wait.
I’m playing with Dave Winer’s OPML editor over here. That space will be a scratch pad to experiment a bit, I’ll write up my observations here once I’ve figured it all out.
Congrats to Dave on hitting this milestone.
Kos points out the incredible commentary from a Deutsche Bank analyst in a recent New York Times article re: Costco and its treatment of its employees:
Wow. How do these Wall Street analysts sleep at night?Costco’s average pay, for example, is $17 an hour, 42 percent higher than its fiercest rival, Sam’s Club. And Costco’s health plan makes those at many other retailers look Scroogish. One analyst, Bill Dreher of Deutsche Bank, complained last year that at Costco “it’s better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder.”
Mr. Sinegal [Costco CEO] begs to differ. He rejects Wall Street’s assumption that to succeed in discount retailing, companies must pay poorly and skimp on benefits, or must ratchet up prices to meet Wall Street’s profit demands.
Good wages and benefits are why Costco has extremely low rates of turnover and theft by employees, he said. And Costco’s customers, who are more affluent than other warehouse store shoppers, stay loyal because they like that low prices do not come at the workers’ expense. “This is not altruistic,” he said. “This is good business.” [Daily Kos] (emphasis mine)
Driving home tonight following an unsuccessful trip to buy a new mattress for the top bunk (the boys have moved into a bunk bed as of tonight!), we faced a dilemma: do we swing by Wal-Mart? They’d probably have one, and it’d be cheap. “No way,” my wife said. “Absolutely not.” Apparently her friends give her a hard time for not shopping at Wal-Mart, but the combination of Wal-Mart’s low-paid employees (who seem altogether unhappy about being there and less than helpful when you need something) with Wal-Mart’s political activity, and their attitude towards employee benefits have reinforced Robin’s (and my) commitment to avoid shopping there. We happily shop at Costco, and have never felt like thier prices or selection have suffered due to their higher employee wages or superior benefits.
We are certainly a prime example of a loyal Costco family — so much so that we used to drive 15 miles to the nearest Costco (even though the Wal-Mart is less than 2 miles from our house). Fortunately, Costco opened a warehouse closer to us (about 2 miles from the house, as a matter of fact) and it’s much easier for us to make the trip with greater frequency.
As for the analyst’s comments about it being better to be an employee or customer than a shareholder? Well, it’s better to be a taxpayer with Costco than it is with Wal-Mart… Thanks to Wal-Mart’s approach to benefits, they’re creating a public burden to the tune of tens of millions of dollars in California alone, could it be hundreds nationwide? From the earlier link:
A study released in August 2004 by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley determined that the healthcare expenses of uninsured Wal-Mart employees were costing the already economically-strapped state $32 million a year in taxpayer funds.
And wait a sec: as long as we’re talking numbers, Costco’s stock is trading at 23x earnings, while Wal-Mart’s is at 19x. Costco’s stock is up 10 percent in the last 12 months, while Wal-Mart’s is down 5 percent. Its profits rose 22 percent last year, to $882m, and its U.S. stores average $121m in sales (compared to $70m for Sam’s Club, the Wal-Mart warehouse company).
Happy, well-compensated employees; a labor-friendly management team with proven results on the bottom line; superior results compared to its better-funded competitor; loyal customers: why would we shop anywhere else?
Two years ago, I pointed to a Britt Blaser post (which linked to Roland, who was linking to the source, Jason Kottke, whew!) about a donut vendor in NYC who put his customers on the honor system, and in the process doubled his customers per minute (as compared to other, similar donut vendors).
Having recently read Freakonomics, this struck me as somewhat similar to the bagel guy they profiled in Chapter One. (You can read at least a couple pages talking about Paul Feldman, the bagel guy, here. Oops. Nope, apparently you can’t link to searches inside the book; just go to the link above, and then search for Feldman.)
I’d love to see Levitt and Dubner look into this on their blog.
Wondering whether anyone out there has experience using NextAlarm? They can redirect your ADT or Brink’s alarm hardware to their service center, and provide Internet-based monitoring of your alarm. They’ll e-mail alerts, provide online account access (two things that ADT doesn’t do) and they’re far less expensive than ADT. I’m pretty impressed so far in checking them out, but would love first-hand reports if anyone has them…
Wow, congratulations is right. Mike points out that our local friends are hitting the big time:
Congratulations are in order to Naperville podcasting superstars, Kris (“with a K”) and Betsy Smith of Croncast.
They were mentioned in the New York Times today as one of the best podcasts to listen to and definitely deserve the nod.
My commutes have really sucked this week as they are currently taking a two-week vacation to catch up on their life without microphones. I’ve had to resort to other podcasts and “real radio” (gasp!)… :)
Keep up the great work, guys. I cannot tell you how much I enjoy your show! [marusin.com]
Hope Kris & Betsy are enjoying their time off, they’ve got an eager audience awaiting their return!
Zorn takes issue with this the Dave Matthews Band flushing its past down the, well, read on…
“Chicago Forgives Dave Matthews -– Dave Matthews Band Fans and Survivors of Last Year’s Incident Celebrate the Return of the band to Chicago” is slated for Friday morning, 7-10 a.m., at the Wendella dock on the Chicago River near the Wrigley Building.
The media advisory says the event will “feature a giant, 20-foot toilet balloon.”
Such décor doesn’t sound to me as though it will promote healing from “last year’s incident” in which Matthews’ bus driver emptied an onboard septic tank onto a tour boat and drenched the passengers with, um, sewage. … Meanwhile, merrymakers will be offered “samples of Ben & Jerry’s new flavor, Dave Matthews Band Magic Brownies.” [Eric Zorn’s Notebook]
Memo to publicist responsible for this promotion: when the faux-pas you’re trying to overcome is raw sewage, “Magic Brownie” ice cream might just send the wrong signal. Just maybe.
Update: Jake has the same reaction…
For the first time in months, we had a serious storm yesterday. From the looks of it, today’s about to make yesterday look dry. Courtesy of WeatherBug (which I got at Gnomedex and I love), check this out:
In our new office, we have a wall of windows facing the Chicago skyline (you can see both the Hancock and the Sears Tower) — yesterday was dramatic, today looks like it’ll be even more fun.
Friend of mine recently started working for Senator Barack Obama as the director of technology — it’s a great fit, and I can’t wait to see what he comes up with. Of course, I already found one thing that has his fingerprints all over it. Go to the new Barack Obama website (glad to see they got the URL, someone had squatted on it long ago), and view source.
Nice.
Just hacked my Movable Type template for my RSS feed, and changed things over at FeedBurner to boot. What I did:
A related note for the second item: my feed circulation is up almost 66% over the past three months, while page views and visitors to the site have been flat. FeedBurner tells me about 800 people are subscribed to my feed, while just 300 read it through a browser each day. (see graphs)
Feed stats from May, 2004 to July, 2005.
Site stats for July, 2004 to July, 2005.
Couple thoughts. My site traffic is wildly inconsistent thanks to some popular bloggers (Kos and Josh in particular) linking to me, which didn’t have a sustained impact but certainly led to some spikes in traffic. It’s the feed growth is particularly interesting to me, as it is steady — and the growth rate has accelerated rather dramatically over the past three months. (Note: it took from May, 2004 to March, 2005 for feed circulation to double, then it doubled again between March and July, 2005.) Meanwhile, site traffic is holding pretty steady at 250-300 visitors and 400-500 page views per day.
Presumably this means that a lot of recent subscribers haven’t read stuff I’ve written in the past, so this is an opportunity to easily expose RSS readers to past articles. Will be interesting to see if this boosts site visitors and page views.
Note — I realize this caused your aggregator to re-load all items in my feed (and/or change all items from read to unread); sorry about that, it’s a necessary by-product of monkeying with the feed.
Update: sheepishly Eric just pointed out that I forgot to close the bold tag in the feed template, causing everything in the “On this day” nugget to be bolded, and, in some aggregators, to render the rest of the page in boldface. Um, sorry. This is still cool though, right? ;)
This cracked me up:
The folks across the street emailed me because they discovered my iTunes collection via wireless. [Paul Boutin]
I guess, as a more-or-less lawyer (though a happily non-practicing one), I should be glad that Google’s keeping a bunch of my former classmates and colleagues employed. But it strikes me as somewhat unnecessary:
Last week, we mentioned how Google News was prominently displaying articles from another site that was simply copying Techdirt’s content (with attribution in a tiny font). … The problem, though, was that Google News seemed to be displaying this content with a link to that site instead of ours, even though the content was originally from our site — not theirs (and our version isn’t smothered with ads as this other site is). In my message to the Google News team I said I had no problem with what this other site was doing, but thought it would be more appropriate to show the Techdirt page. … Google has now responded, saying they “are unable to manually alter the position or ranking of individual stories found in Google News,” but telling me that I should file a DMCA complaint against this other site — at which point Google will take action and (supposedly) remove their site from the index. That’s a pretty extreme response. I don’t want their site to be taken out of Google’s index. I simply think that Google News should be able to recognize that our content belongs in the same results, since it’s content we created in the first place. Shouldn’t there be some sort of middle ground, where Google notices a site is simply copying others’ content and works to make sure the original source is linked, either instead of, or alongside, the copycats? [Techdirt]
This is just excellent, fantastic news:
… Details from the Daily Herald, in a Chicago suburb. The story is useful as a look at OverDrive in action on the local scene. OverDrive deserves credit for what appears to be far-more-flexible DRM than one might expect. Excerpt: By September, Naperville patrons will be able to browse among 2,000 titles from the library Web site … After entering their card number, they’ll have two weeks to download an audiobook or e-book to their computer. They can make up to three copies of the book by transferring the file to an MP3 player or burning it to a CD, and those copies are theirs forever. At the end of two weeks, the original copy can be renewed, or it will automatically expire and no longer open, and be returned to the collection for others to use. … [TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home] [[Technorati] naperville]
Got a call from a recruiter with a high-level placement firm the other day. I’m quite happy here at FeedBurner, so I’m not interested in looking. But I promised the recruiter that I’d put feelers out if anyone that reads this thinks they might be a good fit.
The institute is a post-secondary organization, looking to triple enrollment. They have a new CEO who thinks that they need a senior level marketer (preferably one with significant online marketing experience) to execute on a number of fronts. They have a bunch more info to provide if you’re interested; just drop me a line at rick@rklau.com if you think you match up and I’ll pass your info on to the recruiter.
I’ve been meaning to point out that my good friend Deborah McMurray is blogging now about law firms, marketing and business development. Deborah’s paved the way for many in the legal marketing world, and her insights will be a welcome addition to the blogosphere.
Legal marketers with the word “Chief“ in their title earn an average of $225,208 and a median (half are above/blow) of $200,000, according to statistics released today. The compensation for marketers with “Director“ in their title averaged $111,696 in salary and a median of $99,000.
The average annual base salary for 51% of all law firm marketers combined is less than $75,000; however 26% receive $100,000 or more. At the same time 17% of marketers said they received no annual bonus; 51% received a bonus of only $5,000 or less.
These are the findings of a new Legal Marketing Association “Roles and Compensation Survey“ that will be released July 22. A sneak preview was presented today during an LJN Web Audio Webinar, “What Legal Marketing Professionals Command for Full-Time Salary.”
Thanks to Elizabeth Lampert, President of Elizabeth LampertPR, for organizing the Webinar. All legal marketers will find this interesting, but like the noted panelists, Im hearing about much higher salaries in large, major market firms. [Deborah McMurray]
John Alber’s new article at LLRX.com is almost certainly a harbinger of what every law firm will be implementing in the next few years. Of course, for most firms, “few years” may be more like “few decades”. But it’s at least heartening to know that Bryan Cave (and possibly a few others) are there already.
Anyone thinking about hiring a law firm these days ought to be intrigued by John’s comments:
These bits of information – profit contribution, hours leverage and average rate – are among the half dozen “actionable” metrics that my firm carefully chose to align with its business strategy. Choosing this set of metrics required many long sessions with the firm’s chairman and executive committee, and with our marketing, business development and practice management professionals, as well as others. In all these meetings, we needed to think about our business not just from a practice standpoint, but from a financial standpoint as well.
As part of our strategic planning process, we chose our destination – where we wanted to land. Our BPM metrics now serve as rudders to help our lawyers guide us to that destination. BPM gives lawyers genuine control over where the firm goes.
I was similarly impressed with John’s thoughts on law firms, KM and technology initiatives last year.
My buddy Jason Smith (some here know him as “Texas Rainmaker”, a Republican who often likes to stir the pot) just posted that he’s having neck and spine surgery in the morning. Jason — best of luck on a successful surgery and a speedy recovery, your friends on the right are going to need all the help they can get defending The Architect in the days to come. ;)
Mike McCurry, President Clinton’s press secretary for four years (including the ever-eventful Lewinsky days), wonders whether the current focus on Rove is, well, beside the point. After expressing some sympathy for Scott McClellan, McCurry asks:
Unless conversations go well beyond what has been reported, there has to be some other explanation for the zeal with which this investigation is being pursued. Something consequential must have happened because of this leak that we have not yet read about. That’s about all I can imagine, because otherwise the whole thing — leak, story, investigation — seems a little disproportionate. Maybe a major intelligence operation got botched. Or someone took a real hit somewhere in the world as a result.
Interesting.
This story at Sports Illustrated is just nauseating: Mark R. Downs of Dunbar, Pennsylvania, is a t-ball coach (yes, t-ball) who paid a player to injure a mentally handicapped player so that Dunbar wouldn’t be “forced” to put him in the game and risk his chances at winning.
One really has to wonder whether there are enough laws to keep this asshole as far away from other kids as possible.
Absolutely unbelievable.
Wow — Money magazine says that Naperville is the third best city to live in in America (and the only city over 100,000 residents in the top 10) and the knives come out. As for me? I’ve documented why Robin and I love it here — a wonderful downtown area (enough restaurants to keep you eating for months on end without duplicates), terrific shops (local and national), a phenomenal park district with activities for kids and adults alike, festivals (like Last Fling and Ribfest) that are a great mix of entertainment and community involvement, and easy train access to Chicago. And our kids haven’t even entered the school system yet.
Interested in moving to Naperville? The city has some info for you.
A good overview:
iPodLounge publishes an informative guide for aspiring web DJ’s interested in recording and publishing their own podcast. The guide covers required hardware and software, tips for good content, and how to submit your podcast for availablility in iTunes podcasting directory. This one’s pretty Mac-specific, sorry Windows users. Beginner’s Guide to Podcast Creation [iPodLounge] [Lifehacker]
Chris Casey (happy birthday, Chris!) does his public service duty today by pointing to his brother’s account of the risks inherent in indulging in your Pop Tart cravings. (You must be sure to check out Lawrence Livermore Labs’ warnings about Pop Tarts, Pop Tart blowtorches and Pot Tarts vs. the solar death ray.
Good stuff. Watch those toasters.
On the subject of job announcements, my friend Fred Faulkner is about to become the ABA’s first webmaster. It’s a great fit, and there are sure to be some dramatic improvements in the ABA’s web presence. What’s shocking isn’t that they’ve hired Fred (that should’ve been a foregone conclusion — he’s been at the ABA for years in the LPM section) — it’s that it’s taken the ABA nearly 10 years to create the position. (Side note: my first post-law school employer, Inherent.com, was responsible for several early versions of the ABA’s site dating back to late 1995.) Congrats, Fred!
Today I have accepted a new role at the ABA. On July 26th I will assume the position of Webmaster for the American Bar Association (ABA). In this role I will be responsible for a variety of duties. The short list includes:
- Developing and implementing standardization guidelines
- Coordinate association branding via the Web site
- Content coordination between member and entity groups
- Strategic interaction between staff, members, leadership, and the general public in regards to the ABA Web site
- Research and recommend new Web technologies to increase ABA member benefits [Let’s Ride – Fred Faulkner’s Blog About the Road Called “Life”]
I’ve been fortunate to get to know Matt in the past few months, and have enjoyed swapping thoughts and ideas about RSS with him. This is exciting news for him; he’ll be a real asset to the Yahoo! team (Matt: didn’t the offer letter say something about using the exclamation point?) and it’ll be fun to continue working with him in a different capacity. Congrats, Matt!
I’ve had the good fortune of working with a bunch of really smart people over the last several years at Macworld, The Industry Standard and InfoWorld. Now I have the good fortune of joining a new team of really smart people at Yahoo. IDG is a great place to work, and I’m sad to be leaving. But I’m also thrilled to be joining the Yahoo team and getting deeper into RSS and open media. Fun times ahead. [Matt McAlister]
Hard to believe my first column on blogs for LPM ran in April, 2002. Now it’s an entire issue. That’s what I call mainstream.
Years ago, while working for a company that was in the midst of an IPO, one of our salespeople was fixated on the idea of shopping a sitcom idea to Hollywood. It would feature a ragtag assortment of personalities all working for a .com startup. Hilarity would ensue.
If such a sitcom did exist, today at FeedBurner’s offices would provide ample fodder for its own episode: family tech support day. I don’t know what’s in the air, but several of us have had tech support calls with family members. Mine was this morning: my father-in-law has Verizon at home, and I think that Verizon blocks (blocked? no idea if they still do) access to their outgoing mail server unless you’re connected to their network. This is ostensibly an anti-spam measure, except it’s pretty goofy if you own a laptop: so long as your laptop is actually physically at your house, you can send mail. Go to Starbucks? Can’t send mail. So I just used my own mail server for him to send mail out, bypassing Verizon’s network entirely.
Minor problem: when I reconfigured my mail accounts to forward everything to Gmail, I nuked the account that I was using to send mail… which meant my father-in-law couldn’t send e-mail. Oops. Fortunately it was a fairly easy solution, but a lesson learned: when doing family support, set them up with their own accounts — don’t make them dependent on your own stuff when your stuff is likely to change.
Eric had a much more interesting tech support challenge, which involved instructing parents to “go to the wiring closet”, “find the patch cable” and “type the IP address into your browser”. (The router’s IP config had been wiped.)
I don’t know if it would play well on the networks, but it sure would be realistic. Maybe if Jerry Stiller played the part of someone’s nutty dad…
I’ll be talking with the Gnome himself, Chris Pirillo, on the Chris Pirillo show in a few minutes. It’ll be archived in MP3 once the show’s done, there is also a live feed available.
I’ll be talking about iTunes & podcasts, FeedBurner, and the Cubist period in modern art.
Or maybe just the first two.
The attacks in London today are already the deadliest one-day attack in British history, and the death toll is almost certain to rise. Steve let us know early this morning that he’s OK (he’s in Europe traveling with his family, was in London until yesterday) but may have some trouble getting home. I have IM’d some friends in London to make sure they’re OK, which is a reassuring process.
I’ve also found Wikipedia (collaborative group effort to document what’s known about the attack), Flickr (photos from people watching the TV coverage, some on-the-scene pictures) and Technorati (real-time index of blog postings mentioning London) to be tremendously valuable in supplementing the “traditional” coverage from sites like CNN.com.
To our brothers and sisters in London affected by this tragedy, our thoughts and prayers are with you. I won’t waste any breath on the bastards who persist in this barbaric practice of slaughtering innocents.
Co-worker John Zeratsky posted a few weeks ago about using Gmail as a spam filter — and I’m embarrassed to admit this never occurred to me. (You may recall around the same time I was investigating how to solve my spam problem, with no success.)
I’ve implemented this — essentially forwarding all of my rklau.com e-mail to my Gmail account, where its spam filter grabs all spam, and makes all non-spam available for download via POP — and it’s wonderful. Spam has gone from 150-200 messages a day to zero — making time on my Treo much more efficient, and adding a whole lot less clutter to my Outlook inbox. (Read the comments for another solution that involves re-forwarding the Gmail mailbox so that you can use IMAP on the messages — Gmail doesn’t support IMAP at this time — but so far I haven’t felt the need for IMAP. If needed, I’ll go that route.)
This is a great, free solution that works. Gotta love it.
Erik Heels has a great post detailing all of the five star reviewed albums from Rolling Stone, along with a year-by-year breakdown.
Thanks to suggestions from Steve and Will, I decided to stop trying to figure out the elegant solution to getting podcasts on my Treo and go at it much more simply. (For the record: the elegant way would be having the MP3s sync to the Treo during a Palm HotSync.)
Since the Treo’s built-in memory is limited, the MP3s have to be stored on an SD card, and I already own a 1 gigabyte SD card for the Treo. Both Steve and Will recommended an SD card reader, which would make the copying/syncing of files to the card much simpler (not to mention a whole lote faster) — and yesterday, Fry’s had a 12-in-1 card reader for just $4.99 (ordinarily it’s $14.99).
Bingo. Now I can have my podcasts auto-downloaded to the SD card (which is mapped as a drive in Windows), then just drop the card in the Treo and play the MP3s. (Of course, that means I have to remember to remove the card!)
Bottom line, this is a simple, easy way to ensure that I can regularly get new podcasts to listen to on my Treo.
Holy cow: Netflix represents .3% of the USPS annual revenue. (In actual dollar terms: $200m out of $69b.)
Very cool: the newest podcast to run through FeedBurner is Lance Armstrong’s podcast, part of his Sirius satellite radio program. The Tour de France starts this weekend, and you can get his commentary delivered straight to you through that feed.
Bonne chance, Lance!
