Self-Aggrandizement: July 2005 Archives

Lobster
Filed July 31, 2005 10:03 PM.

Just returned from a weekend jaunt down to Florida, for my grandfather's 85th birthday. And while my canasta and shuffleboard skills are duly honed, I've also scored the sort of fire-engine red shoulder sunburn only possible after beach front hours in the mid-day sun deep in a summer previously spent entirely t-shirted.

As typing requires moving, further dispatches await purchase and copious application of industrial strength aloe salve.

Until then, I'm off to take a bottle of Advil.

Let the Games Begin
Filed July 27, 2005 1:21 PM.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about a night on the town with Rob Barnum, who heads up Cyan + Long Tail's West Coast office, and who had ostensibly come to New York to get some film-related work done.

Instead, that week our best work took place out of the office, on Friday night, at a succession of West Village bars. There, we spun variations on a yarn about being blimp racers that was so over-the-top I couldn't believe it consistently and repeatedly worked in picking up women.

Sure, I'd long believed that the secret to the bar scene is quickly and positively differentiating yourself from the slew of generic lotharios working their best "come here often?" lines. But I had never before pushed so deep into the realm of the ridiculous in the process, and never before seen such effortless results.

So, in the middle of last week, I decided I'd take things up yet another few notches. Which led me, at a bar near Gramercy Park, to instigate and referee a rock-paper-scissors tournament between two groups of attractive women.

I tried it again in Boston this past Friday night, with girls so jadedly halter-topped as to preclude nearly any other approach, and was stunned to find the ploy again worked flawlessly.

At a subsequent bar, I inked out a tic-tac-toe game on the back of a napkin, and requested the waitress deliver it to a group of girls at the far end of the bar. I told the waitress to deliver it circuitously, though, and to bring the napkin back and forth, between moves, surreptitiously enough to keep my identity as anonymous challenger secret as long as possible.

Which worked, in short, even better than rock-paper-scissors, and culminated in numbers not only from two of my amused adversaries, but from the intervening waitress as well, who tucked hers in alongside the bill.

Still, I'm not sure if I'll have the chance to give any of them a call; I'll be too busy working up my Yahtzee game and Rubik's Cube skills. If tic-tac-toe works well, then either of those should absolutely kill.

Relax
Filed July 27, 2005 12:23 PM.

"A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life."
- Slow Food International Manifesto

Vindicated
Filed July 19, 2005 6:38 PM.

For years, my younger brother has been calling me a 'drunken monkey'.

Turns out, he was right:

Intern-tainment
Filed July 19, 2005 4:43 PM.

For a while, I've thought about getting goldfish, or maybe an ant farm. Today, however, I realized it's far easier to plug in an iSight camera, point it at Cyan's interns, and watch them on live video stream in a corner of my computer screen.

At least as entertaining as fish or ants, and I don't even have to feed them.

Notes from a Birthday Weekend
Filed July 18, 2005 11:32 AM.

As previously noted, this Saturday, I turned 26. Or, as I like to think of it, 'double bar mitzvah'.

A few thoughts on the misadventures involved:

The birthday weekend actually started Thursday night, with drinks and more drinks at Russian Samovar. Though I haven't been to that bar for over a month, the bartenders, proprietors, and even piano players all still knew me by name. I take this to be a dangerous sign for the state of my liver.
The crowd that Thursday was wonderfully eclectic, with two sets of aunts and uncles, friends, colleagues, interns, and ex-girlfriends. It's always a bit terrifying to see spheres of your life collide, and a wonderful relief when the people you like, like each other.
Apparently, one of the aunts in attendance got drunk enough to reapply lipstick in the mirror behind her several times, before the other aunt told her that it wasn't actually a mirror, but a clear glass divider between their table and the next. Hooray for family!
Another reason to love my family: my mother pre-ordered me a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which arrived early Saturday morning.
Despite my other engagements during the weekend, I polished off all 652 Potter pages by 7:00pm on Sunday.
Saturday afternoon, I joined my grandmother at the Laura Pels Theater, for the Roundabout's new production, Jon Robin Baitz's The Paris Letter. The play itself was good, though not great; the acting was extraordinary. Also, as two or three friends have previously noted, Ron Rifkin does look a bit like my father.
I splurged for a birthday dinner of hugely overpriced sushi, a good reminder after a few months of lower-end sushi joints that, at least with sushi, you get what you pay for.
My great-grandmother, Nana, would buy herself birthday gifts each year, so that she'd be sure to receive at least one or two things she really wanted. I think this is an excellent plan.
To that end, I bought myself a Nokia 7280, for use as a 'weekends and evenings' cell phone. My trusty Treo, which I love to death, is a bit large for casual pocketing, causing me to often leave it behind when heading out for the night. Now, I can switch my SIM card to the Nokia, which has the added benefit of looking alarmingly like a tube of lipstick might in the world of Tron.
Saturday evening, I took the phone back to Samovar, for a second birthday party. One reason I love the place: we drank eleven carafes of home-brewed flavored vodka; they charged us for four.
Another gift-to-self birthday present: gymnastics rings. Give me six months of practice, and I should have an Iron Cross.
Speaking of which, as recently added to the left sidebar, I'm helping to head up a new group-training gym, CrossFit NYC. I showed up to co-lead the Sunday morning class, less hung over than still drunk.
Also speaking of which, at Russian Samovar on Saturday night, as we were getting ready to leave the bar and brave the stifling humidity outside, I peeled off my button-down shirt, to just the fitted gray undershirt beneath. A girl at the next table, with whom I'd been intermittently flirting, blurted out, "wow, so I guess you go to the gym," blushing as soon as that popped out of her mouth. It was the best compliment I've received in weeks.
Interesting fact: you know who totally remembers your birthday and sends an awkward email each year? Girls you've slept with.

And, finally, a quick birthday history story:

I was born at 2:27pm, July 16th, 1979, at Stanford Hospital. In the State of California, during the first three hours of a baby's life, the attending doctor or nurse is required to give the baby Silver Nitrate eye drops, to prevent infection. The drops, however, blur the baby's vision for several hours.

As soon as I had popped out, I started looking around. Taking in everything. The nurse told my parents that she couldn't bear to put those eye drops in, that she'd wait until the latest moment allowed by law, as she'd never before seen a baby so engrossed by the world, so enthralled by just sucking everything in.

Even in those first hours of life, I couldn't get enough. I still can't.

Natal
Filed July 16, 2005 8:02 AM.

Today is my 26th birthday!

Undisclosed
Filed July 11, 2005 10:41 AM.

Back in my venture capital days, I saw and signed a slew of NDA's, or non-disclosure agreements, which guaranteed that, as a signee, I wouldn't steal a company's ideas and try to pass them off as my own.

Running Cyan, I almost never saw an NDA - literary releases, perhaps, but rarely something that guaranteed the secrecy of abstractly discussed ideas for running a business. Since starting Long Tail a few months back, however, those NDAs have returned to my life in full force. My desk is littered with them, and my fax machine buzzes with incoming and outgoing signed copies throughout the day.

Long Tail, on the other hand, doesn't have an NDA of its own. In part because, from a legal standpoint, most aren't worth the paper they're printed on. But mainly because I don't think business ideas themselves are worth all that much. The best way to protect a good idea, by far, is to execute it, really, really well.

As we've been lining up vendor partnerships for digital release of Long Tail's content, many of the NDA's I've signed recently cover aspects of selling movies over the internet. Yet, I suspect, most reasonably bright eight year olds could come up with the same concept: "Hey! You know what would be great? You should be able to buy movies online like you buy MP3s!!"

No shit. But saying as much doesn't make it so. Instead, you have to somehow piece together an endless array of servers and bandwidth and software and content partnerships, top it off with some special sauce, and then get your downloads out into the world. Doing so, as you might imagine, takes ungodly amounts of work. Which, in short, is why Long Tail is partnering with digital download vendors in the first place: the millions of dollars and thousands of hours of sweat equity these companies put in to making movie downloads work will doubtless yield far better solutions than my colleagues and I could half-assedly cobble together in-house in our spare time.

So, send me your NDA. I'm happy to sign it. I'll even use my good pen. But if you think that piece of paper brings you even one step closer to changing the world or retiring young to the Bahamas, you're out of your mind. While you and your lawyers were drafting up that NDA, moving commas and reworking clauses, somebody else was busy instead making the same idea into a reality. And that's the person we're going to partner with. Because, odds are, they're about to kick your ass.

[Post-script: about three minutes after I put this online, another "fully executed" NDA just rolled out of my fax machine. The timeliness of Self-Aggrandizement entries never ceases to amaze.]

Laugh Du Jour
Filed July 11, 2005 8:43 AM.

This one goes out to Cyan's attorneys and accountant:

A Mafia Godfather finds out that his bookkeeper has, over the past three years, embezzled nearly ten million dollars.

The bookkeeper is deaf, which the Godfather considered an occupational benefit, as not hearing privileged side-conversations would keep him from ever testifying in court.

The Godfather goes to shake down the bookkeeper about the missing $10 million, and brings along his attorney, who knows sign language.

"Where is the ten million bucks you stole from me?" the Godfather asks.

The attorney, using sign language, asks the bookkeeper where the ten million dollars is hidden.

The bookkeeper signs back: "I don't know what you are talking about."

"He says he doesn't know what you're talking about," the attorney translates.

The Godfather pulls out a 9mm pistol, puts it to the bookkeeper's temple, cocks it, and says: "Ask him again!"

The attorney signs to the underling: "He'll kill you for sure if you don't tell him!"

"Okay! You win!" the bookeeper signs back. "The money is in a brown briefcase, buried behind the shed in my cousin Enzo's backyard in Queens!"

"Well, what'd he say?" the Godfather asks the attorney.

"He says," the attorney replies, "you don't have the balls to pull the trigger."

[Special thanks to David Greenberg, who narrowly avoided becoming a lawyer himself, for the joke.]

Monologue
Filed July 6, 2005 7:55 PM.

Sport psychologists often say that a key trait of the best athletes is constant visualization - playing through, in their minds' eyes, upcoming competitions, again and again, until, when they come to a big event itself, it seems like nothing new.

I, instead, and likely far less helpfully, tend to visualize post-facto. After a conversation, I run it repeatedly in my head, tweaking what I said or what they said, working out more clever responses than I could possibly have generated in that first, in-the-moment pass.

The problem is, recently, somewhere in all of those conversational re-runs, I forget that I'm supposed to be doing them only internally. Mid-conversation, I'll suddenly say my next line out loud: "Sure, in Kansas," or "Anybody can option the script."

It isn't until the full sentence is out of my mouth, however, that I realize I've somehow moved from inner world to outer. Then, guiltily, like someone who trips on a curb and tries to dance it off, I act the next few moments as if it were entirely intentional to have suddenly voiced a non-sequitur, out of nowhere, and to nobody in particular.

And, frankly, it never really works. But, at least, I can replay that recovery, again and again in my head, until I've come up with something that would.

Self-Determination
Filed July 4, 2005 7:22 PM.

"Here sir, the people govern."
- Alexander Hamilton, in a speech to the New York Ratifying Convention

Though, in recent years, my patriotism has been at times unduly tested, though at moments I have despaired for our ongoing experiment in national self-governance, each 4th of July, my love for America renews. For each Independence Day, I think upon the Founding Fathers, that motley band of forward-thinking, eloquent-talking drunks who, eleven score and nine years ago, had the outrageous, fortuitous cajones to say, "this whole 'starting a new country' thing doesn't look too hard; let's give it a go."

The Founding Fathers! A group so sure that fortune favors the bold they willingly laid their lives on the line to stand behind the bold notion of independence, of a complex nation based on the simple ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Certainly, I have my concerns and quibbles with where this nation stands. But, on balance, I can understand why they inscribed the Great Seal with "Annuit Coeptis" - "Providence favors our undertakings". More than two centuries later, I can't help but think they were absolutely right.

The Upside of Not Blogging
Filed July 3, 2005 6:18 PM.

"There are very few people who don't become more interesting when they stop talking." - Mary Lowry

Lobster Filed July 31, 2005 10:03 PM.

Let the Games Begin Filed July 27, 2005 1:21 PM.

Relax Filed July 27, 2005 12:23 PM.

Vindicated Filed July 19, 2005 6:38 PM.

Intern-tainment Filed July 19, 2005 4:43 PM.

Notes from a Birthday Weekend Filed July 18, 2005 11:32 AM.

Natal Filed July 16, 2005 8:02 AM.

Undisclosed Filed July 11, 2005 10:41 AM.

Laugh Du Jour Filed July 11, 2005 8:43 AM.

Monologue Filed July 6, 2005 7:55 PM.

Self-Determination Filed July 4, 2005 7:22 PM.

The Upside of Not Blogging Filed July 3, 2005 6:18 PM.