Shabbir's Diary

The weird shit in my life.

I remember, about 17 years ago, having the bizarre experience of being the organizer of an anti-homophobia rally in Lafayette, IN.  (Purdue)   The hatemongers had come to town to present their entirely unscientific basis for the scourge of homosexuality on society.  The presentation contained no science, but a few passages from the bible combined with video of naked men on Pride Day in San Francisco with the warning, "Is this what you want in Lafayette?"   Their arrival was timed to influence a city council vote on a measure that would have prohibited discrimination in housing and employment for sexual orientation.

I organized a silent protest, and we overflowed the hall where they presented without anyone saying a word.  We brought lots of blank posters and wrote our comments and held them up for the audience, speakers and tv cameras to see.  We may not have won any arguments that night, but we managed to win the respect of the centrists in town.  In fact one of the professional men at the Purdue Computer Center came up to me and said how impressed he was.  "The last thing we wanted to see was that kind of ACT UP shouting here, but that was really the right way to go about showing your displeasure.  It impressed a lot of people."

The measure eventually passed (in the middle of the night to allow several council members to save face and abstain). 

[The weird part]
The afternoon before the protest the local tv station sent a reporter out to interview me.  He was a friend of mine, and he was a closeted gay man.  I was pretty close to both him and his partner.  I had the entirely bizarre experience of being interviewed about why gays and lesbians shouldn't be discriminated against in their employment, by a man who was afraid of being discriminated against in his employment.   The whole interview was like a mental whipsaw.  It rocked 9 on the Richter scale of weirdness for me.

To that I can add the following experience from this weekend.

Me: "Hey, pop (my stepfather), you've got some stuffed shells frozen in here.  We could have those.  We just need some marinara sauce."

Pop: "Oh, there's some that Linda made frozen downstairs.  I just have to thaw it in the microwave."

Me: "....."

Pop: "Your mom made a lot of food and froze it.  It's pretty much been what I've been eating since she died."

Me: "....."

Pop: "We don't have to eat that if you don't want to."

Me: "...........

Hey, is this one of Aunt Debbie's casseroles in here?"

[35 minutes later at 350 degrees]

Me: "The casserole is still frozen solid.  You want to thaw out that sauce?"

Pop: "Sure."

The weirded part is that the sauce was just ok.  Shouldn't pasta sauce made by your recently deceased and much-loved mother be some sort of ambrosia?   Shouldn't you taste it and go, "Hey, the angels left this behind.  Fools!"

The cooking I will remember her for will be her noodles and mashed potatoes, not her pasta sauce.
  There's none of that in the freezer, so thankfully my memory of that dish can stay all starchy idealized and perfect.

Using Web Parody

If you came here looking for the AMPTP.com Parody Website case study, PRNews.com has picked it up as an exclusive for 14 days, so please go over there and subscribe to their website.  We'll have it back here on February 19th, 2008 after their exclusive has expired.

Steve Jobs.  Kim Jong Il.  George W. Bush.  The WTO.  Tina Brown's Talk magazine.  The major Hollywood film and tv studios.

What do all these have in common?  They've all been skewered by cleverly written web parodies that created a significant platform for their critics to jibe them publicly.  It's an amazingly powerful technique, and you should take a look at my in-depth examination of one of these efforts.

I've just finished the first of several articles about online engagement techniques, this one about web parody.  If you ever find yourself with an opponent, be it an actual person, an industry, or a state of mind ("Colon Cancer can't happen to me!"), one of the great tools at your disposal is parody.  Here's a case study of one successful use. 

If you came here looking for the AMPTP.com Parody Website case study, PRNews.com has picked it up as an exclusive for 14 days, so please go over there and subscribe to their website.  We'll have it back here on February 19th, 2008 after their exclusive has expired.

 

Your own home: America's Debtor's Prison

The almost unbelievable irresponsibility with debt displayed by homeowners like today’s is so amazing, so far beyond any form of excusable behavior, that you have to wonder if it is right to forgive it. If someone borrows hundreds of thousands of dollars against their home and ends up with a short sale requiring the forgiveness of this debt, how do you feel about it?

From a new blog gem, Irvine Housing Blog.  They're vision of overpriced, over-leveraged housing as a modern Debtor's Prison is cynical but like all cynicism, based in some reality.

As an aside, I love them for their research.  This is how I want to professionally write.

Web comics

I've become obsessed with web comics.  Brendan Cahill's "Outside the box" is beautiful if not a little enjoyably cliche noir.  I pause and savor each frame.

I really like Planet Karen's diary style, and I'm constantly laughing out loud at the Hollywood cynicism of "Don't Forget To Validate Your Parking".  You know that xkcd.com speaks to my inner nerd, of course.  (Inner?  How much more obvious of a nerd could I be?)

Poker raid....in the Bay Area?

Sheesh, I thought I left this behind when I came west, apparently they raid tiny little poker games here.

The players group, which advertised on Meetup.com, typically required a $25 to $55 buy-in, said Alcantara and members of the group. An additional refreshment fee of $5 was collected as well.

On Monday, members of the group described it as a low-key circle of people, mostly professionals in their 30s and 40s, interested in meeting friends.

..

Belmont resident Luke DeSantos, also at Saturday’s game, said the charges against Cardenas are difficult to believe.

“Bert is just an avid poker lover and started the group so he could play more. He barely ever wins,” DeSantos said.

 

Examiner.com Related Articles:

• Rising hops prices spill over to beer drinkers
• Peninsula Police Blotter: Neighborhood crime log
• Mavericks rides storm’s wave
• Proposed cuts could bleed county
• Wallenberg doesn't let history repeat itself

Really nice hotels

Which of these statements is not true?

Really nice 4 star hotels have:

1. a multipage menu available 24 hours a day.
2. have an LG plasma tv in the room.
3. have cleverly placed outlets next to the bed, so you don't have to unplug a lamp to use/charge your laptop while sitting up in bed.
4. can be reserved during the week in downtown Chicago for $85 / night.
5. have hotel wide wifi, instead of some stupid cable that requires you to sit at the desk and use the net.
6. are pre-warmed when you walk into them to a comfortable room temperature.
7. have 1L bottles of Evian for $5.95 placed suggestively in three places around the hotel room.

If your guess was #4, sorry.  It's #6, my room is freezing.  But I don't have any complaints about the Hotel Intercontinental here in Chicago, I got a great deal with my standard $85 bid for a 4 star hotel, and I'm thrilled.  Somewhere my corporate Controller and my business partners are smiling.

The things that will kill me.

So I had my annual physical this week.  I expected this meeting consisted of me going into the doctor with all sorts of data about the top ten things that kill American white men aged 40 and asking to be tested, and him refusing.  This being a new doctor, I was ginger about how I approached these questions.  I started, as we all should, with the CDC's website.  Instead of the puffery, I went straight to the research and got the data, the most important of which is "National Vital Statistics Report: Deaths, Leading Causes for 2004". 

It takes a couple of years to compile this data, and it was just released and updated in November 2007, so it was the most current.  I picked it up and then dug into find what's been killing American men.  I only focused on the top 10, figuring that the more obscure the cause of death, the less likely I am to succumb to it, and the less practical it is to screen for.  Though if I die of #11 on the list, it will be aggravating.

So the top 10 things that are likely to kill a white* male aged 40 are:

1. Accidents
2. Diseases of the heart
3. Malignant neoplasms (cancer)
4. Intentional self-harm (suicide)
5. HIV
6. Chronic liver disease and cirhosis
7. Assault (homicide)
8. Diabetes-related maladies
9. Cerebrovascular disease
10. Influenza and pneumonia

*(No, I'm not white, but economically I think I am, and in fact, I'm ethnically half white.  And there's no table of what kills people of 'cracker/Pakistani origin, so this will have to do)

This items are 80% of the causes of death.  I ticked off the stuff I'd done to address them.

"Doc, I avoid hard liquor (#6), sold both my motorcycles (#1), gave up snowboarding (#1), don't cheat on my wife (#5), and try and focus on the things that make me happy (#4).  Also I'm more than happy to give up my wallet in a mugging (#7) which I know I can do, because I've been mugged in Brooklyn."

He seemed pretty comfortable with my list and started a list of his own.  He pulled out the complete blood and urine test sheet he was filling out and started checking off the items he was testing for.  When he was done we'd covered my list between the two.  The only other one is a flu shot.  I need to get one to deal with the influenza risk.

What I found amazing is that there's no website business for this.  I would think that someone would have created a website where you put in your age and it tells you what you're likely to die of, but it hasn't been done yet.  So if you're the kind of entrepreneur who wants to do this, call me to beta test.  I'll be your evangelist.

Comics of course. And other stuff

Boom Studios, which publishes a couple of awesome zombie comics released "North Wind" recently both for free online and in comic shops for sale.  This is pretty cool.  I asked my local comic book guy, Frank of Amazing Fantasy in the Sunset, what he thought about it.

He said, "I know comic book shops that believe that giving this away for free online will eat into their profits, but anything that gets more people reading comics increases our market.  Comics used to be sold everywhere, now it's only in comic shops.  We need to get more people reading comics, because that grows the market for people that buy our products."

He's a wise man.

I'll be following the comic now as long as it's free, and if they stop making it free, I'll buy the next trade paperback they release with the compiled issues.

After all, free isn't a business model, it's a marketing tactic.  It worked on me.

The quick life recap

New Year's Eve was quiet.  I contracted some version of a stomach bug and put myself on the couch for 2 days.  Still got it but thanks to modern medicine, I've alleviated the symptoms and have been working since the 2nd!

I asked a few of you by e-mail about the online experts you follow.  I'm looking for role models to emulate in creating my own online marketing efforts.  Here's the list I ended up with:

One set of people have worked so hard on their positions that they are undeniably the best in their field.  Their influence extends far, and they move opinion when they speak.  I labeled them 'forces of nature':

• Seth Godin: online marketer and force of nature
• Violet Blue: sex-positive blogger, columnist, editor, also a force of nature
• Paul Kedrosky: VC, blogger, widely quoted financial analyst
• Om Malik: tech writer, force of nature (my heart goes out to him, he just had a cardiac event)

Others are influential but haven't found the secret sauce that catapults them farther.  They are still wildly successful with lots of readers.  They are what I would call the influencers:

• Steve Rubel: micropersuasion blog
• John Gruber: Apple observer/commenter
• Wil Wheaton: actor, author
• CR and Tanta: Calculated Risk blog authors, press-shy influencers
• Joel Spolsky: JoelOnSoftware and software company CEO, force of nature
  

Then there are the pundits. 

• Robert Scoble: egoblogger
• Walter Biscardi: video editor

This is by no means a complete list, just what came to mind for I and a few of you when I asked about your role models for these sorts of online experts.  I tried to do a little deconstruction to see what made some of these forces of personality tick.  I pulled out some elements of their business into a small spreadsheet which I've published on Google docs so you can read it.

Some interesting things to note:

• Some of the most influential experts I've identified post at least daily, some multiple times a day.
• The top ones have four or five years under their belt.
• They also have (or have had) a magazine column.
• A book doesn't hurt either.

Honestly, I expect the quality that makes them successful is a talent for insightful analysis, the ability to write well, and the commitment to churn out the content.  That and some luck doesn't hurt.