Where’s the peanut butter?!

We went to Whistler for the last time this season last weekend and met our
friends Ben and Leslie who left the fief for href="http://www.google.com/">greener pastures about a year ago. It’s
interesting to talk with people who work on ads since I usually agree with href="http://www.bio.umass.edu/micro/faculty/reiner.html">one of my
professors from UMass who said
advertising and marketing should be illegal. Google does a surprisingly good
job of it though and I think it’s an evolution in advertising that I hope other
channels will start to adopt. Namely, the ads are subtle but unmistakable,
highly relevant, and generate close to no waste. I think this addresses what I
think are the chief problems with most advertising - it’s obnoxious (flash
animations that fly across the screen), manipulating (ads that make you think
you’re clicking something else), completely unrelated (think random banner
cycling or spam), or wasteful (printing + shipping + mailing + delivering ==
waste).

The DMA will send you a brochure
extolling the virtues of direct marketing basically along the lines I just drew
up. Unfortunately, their idea and the conventional idea of targeted marketing
means sending you a huge Pottery Barn catalog. I hope as long as we’ve got
marketing that it can all try to be as smart as Google.

Moshe just reminded me I haven’t been updating this. So let’s get the ball
back on track!

Last weekend we went to Whistler for the official start of the late season
and had a blast. I’ll note to the people who came up with various lame
excuses to not join us on the trip that the fridge magnet on our lodging
correctly assessed it as “For those people who choose to live beyond the
dreams of others.” Our 3 story unit at the href="http://www.whiskijack.com/images/photos/360/VGH_EXT.jpg">Village Gate
House (the corner unit + side) had a private hot tub/steam room, private
bedroom, balcony, upstairs single beds and a large living, dining, and
kitchen area. Real World filming crew optional.

Going across the Canadian border we skipped the usual I-5 or Blaine truck
route that goes from Seattle to Whistler and tried the href="http://www.bts.gov/itt/cross/ports/port_wa.html">Lynden border
crossing. Basically we got on 539 in Bellingham, crossed the border where
the road becomes Canada 13 and that took us straight to the trans-canada
1. This worked out very well.

We also went on ZipTrek Ecotours - a
new zipline outfit with 4 cables running back and forth across Fitzsimmons
Creek. This was much fun. Our tour guide, Rob, mentioned that he didn’t get
much of a rush out of it, though, and later mentioned that he was a
firefighter and heard there was some great money and adrenaline involved as
a href="http://jobprofiles.netscape.monster.com/Content/job_content/JC_Military/JSC_PrivateSecurity/JOB_SmokeJumper/jobzilla_html?jobprofiles=1">smoke
jumper. I didn’t mention I stare at a fancy TV screen all day.

I’m a lof things but one thing I’m not is an athelete. Years ago in high
school I batted .000 over the entire gym softball unit. I very, very clearly
remember the day Chad Suppa told everybody “I’m gonna pitch to him until he
hits it!” I don’t know how much time was left in class that day, but I took
it up. Ha, ha. I think he’s probably in prison now. That’s why it’s so nice
to be able to join the summer softball league at work, because I’m amongst
non-atheletes. Last year our team slugged it out for last place — an honor
narrowly avoided by allowing fewer runs against than the ultimate
losers. This year we’re starting fresh and have even come up with a new
name. It was almost something very embarrassing but thankfully Andy’s
Anagram Solver came up with a compromise and the href="http://www.ssynth.co.uk/~gay/cgi-bin/nph-anag?line=Arschfickers&words=2&dict=antworth&doai=on">Crack
Sheriffs (Sherifs, technically) are ready for the comeback of the 2003!

Tonight was great. The Edge came from behind in their game against the
Marauders to tie 4-4. Number 37, Tanya Niemeyer, scored her first goal of
the season and first href="http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=hat+trick">hat
trick of her career! Afterwards we went to Sluggers with my mom and
had a beer with the team.

Trying out href="http://www.hutteman.com/weblog/2003/04/06.html#000056">SharpReader
for aggregation. It’s very slick. It looks like the free blogger.com service
doesn’t include RSS aggregation which means I might want to switch to href="http://www.raelity.org/apps/blosxom/">blosxom, which would also
mean hosting on apache at home since stupid Brinkster support ASP[.NET].

My dad has been doing some research into the question on the authorship of
the works attributed to href="http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare">William Shakespeare. I
won’t disclose his findings, but there’s some interesting research coming
out now on a related subject - Thomas Huxley’s assertion that over infinite
time and given an infinite number of typewriters, an infinite number of
monkeys will produce the complete works. href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=817&e=1&u=/ap/britain_monkey_authors">AP
is reporting the results of href="http://www.vivaria.net/experiments/notes/documentation/">some British
researchers and it turns out that href="http://www.vivaria.net/experiments/notes/documentation/">over one
month six monkeys produce something - well, something href="http://www.vivaria.net/experiments/notes/publication/NOTES_EN.pdf">not
quite on par with the Bard.

tonight are the vice presidential debates hosted in cleveland at my alma mater, case western reserve university. will cheney successfully come off sounding like the prophet who helped us unseat a dangerous dictator? will edwards successfully paint a picture of cheney as a zealot who planned the invassion of iraq four years ago?

im a little worried that everyone already knows the answer before the debates have begun except that we dont all agree on the answer.

I asked Tanya what we should do last night and she recommended seeing Rivers
and Tides - great! We had a nice dinner at href="http://www.epinions.com/rest-Restaurants-All-Mama_Melina">Mama
Melina. We didn’t realize there would be live music when we got there
but a few minutes after walking in we heard a piano playing the familiar
opening bars of href="http://media.midiringtones.com/media/previews/smartMsg/3389.mp3">Sweet
Home Alabama. Kind of weird for an Italian restaurant and they switched
back to a more standard operatic repertoire afterwards. Next we went
upstairs to the href="http://www.landmarktheatres.com/Market/Seattle/SevenGablesTheatre.htm">Seven
Gables Theater to see Rivers
and Tides, a documentary about thef Scotish artist href="http://cgee.hamline.edu/see/goldsworthy/see_an_andy.html">Andy
Goldsworthy. Andy Goldsworthy’s natural art is visually breathtaking. He
works href="http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues97/feb97/twigs_jpg.html">wood,
href="http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues97/feb97/spiral_jpg.html">ice,
stone
and other matrials on installations that grow and transform over time. Go
see this movie while it’s in theaters.

So this is probably the start of my weblog. Who cares? Maybe nobody, but lately a bunch of my friends have moved away from Seattle and it seems this might be a nice way to post thoughts about what’s interesting to me lately and hopefully (if others set up their own blogs), what’s going on with some of them.

For instance, Howard can give updates on the SARS situation in Singapore and Ben or Leslie can leak information about exciting developments in the world of blogging since they moved to Google, Hamoudi can talk about the future of Moroccan penny stocks, and Nick (who didn’t technically move anywhere) can tell us how his new business is going. How cool is that?

In an open society, our media would be scrambling to verify or refute this:

Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was captured by US troops only after he
had been taken prisoner by Kurdish forces, drugged and abandoned ready for
American soldiers to recover him, a British Sunday newspaper said.

…

A former Iraqi intelligence officer, whom the Express did not name, told
the paper that Saddam was held prisoner by a leader of the Kurdish
Patriotic Front, which fought alongside US forces during the Iraq war,
until he negotiated a deal.

The deal apparently involved the group gaining political advantage in the
region.

An unnamed Western intelligence source in the Middle East told the Express:
“Saddam was not captured as a result of any American or British
intelligence. We knew that someone would eventually take their revenge, it
was just a matter of time.”