The Jay-Blog

Just another day at the

Just another day at the Ranch 99 Market

When you go into an authentic Chinese restaurant, there are all these signs in Chinese on the walls. You just know the locals are ordering the good stuff at bargain-basement rates, the dishes that never appear on the menus the round-eyed people get. Maybe that's not it. Maybe they're protecting us from things we don't want to know.

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to an amazing array of ethnic groups. The Asian community is large enough to justify a local all-Asian shopping mall. My favorite store there is the Ranch 99 Market.

The name is misleading. "Ranch 99" sounds like the sort of place you'd buy chewing tobacco and a case of shotgun shells. This Ranch is a grocery store. For Asians. Chineses, Japanese, Indonesian, Thai, you name it. Walking the aisles is an anthropology lesson. Pickled lettuce, live geoduck clams, whole durian fruit. I buy baggies of dried anchovies and eat 'em like popcorn.

Today I was buying some spiced baby octopi to grill this evening when I came upon this unlikely package:

Instant Jew's Ear Fungus (!)

If that's what those signs in the restaurants say.... Well, as I mentioned, I don't want to know. Jew's Ear Fungus. Jesus help us.

today is a day of

today is a day of reflection and intellectual clean-up. i'm sorting through the stack in the in-box(es). an article in business week about forest labs caught my eye.

From Andrew's book about depression, The Noonday Demon:

Quotes from famous depressives:

"If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth." Abraham Lincoln

"I felt a Funeral in my Brain." Emily Dickinson

"Anybody can have a depressing day, I do regularly. But I don't identify that with a real continuing [Churchill] type of black dog, which I certainlly have had. It's just deeper and worse, and persists." John Kenneth Galbraith

Failing to treat depression is the same as failing to treat a broken arm. Sure, it may grow back on it's own. But it may not. And why endure the pain while awaiting recovery.

The black dog chased me for decades, constraining my work with self-imposed limits. A pessimist does a poor job of assessing the odds of success. So why bother?

If you know anyone who is perpetually morose, who lacks all self-confidence, and/or who is contemplating suicide, tell them depression is a disease. You're sick, you go to a doctor. Anti-depressants work.

"I think we agree, the

"I think we agree, the past is over."
Geroge W. Bush, on his meeting with John McCain,
Dallas Morning News, May 10, 2000

the love song of j.

the love song of j. al
Here's a version of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in words of one syllable by Bob Rossney.

Let us go then, you and I
When the night is laid out on the sky
Like a sick guy conked out on a bench.
Let us go, through all these half-dead streets

The dull-voiced beats
Of too-long nights in by-the-hour dives
And bad steak joints where men can't take their wives:
Streets that go on like a long dull talk
Whose real point is
To make you ask a great big thing.

Oh, do not ask "What is it?"
Let us go and see what's up.

In the room the gals all come and go
What's on their mind: it ain't Van Gogh.

Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and

Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter
by Geoffrey Sonnabend

In his three volume work Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter, Geoffrey Sonnabend departed from all previous memory research with the premise that memory is an illusion. Forgetting, he believed, not remembering is the inevitable outcome of all experience. From this perspective,

"We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrieveability of its moments and events."

Sonnabend did not attempt to deny that the experience of memory existed. However, his entire body of work was predicated on the idea that what we experience as memories are in fact confabulations artificial constructions of our own design built around sterile particles of retained experience which we attempt to make live again by infusions of imagination - much as the blacks and whites of old photographs are enhanced by the addition of colors or tints in attempt to add life to a frozen moment.

Sonnabend believed that long term or "distant" memory was illusion, but similarly he questioned short term or "immediate" memory. On a number of occasions Sonnabend wrote, "there is only experience and its decay" by which he meant to suggest that what we typically call short term memory is, in fact, our experiencing the decay of an experience. Interestingly, however, Sonnabend employed the term true memory, to describe this process of decay which, he held, was, in actuality, not memory at all.

TinyURL looks like a great

TinyURL looks like a great way to avoid those long URLs that break at the end of a line.

Heads I win, tails you

Heads I win, tails you lose.

What would Walter do?

Too many rats in this

Too many rats in this maze department

last night i get a call on the cell phone asking, "is this jay cross marketing?" yes. "i just wanted to know." odd but all in a day's work.

this morning i get another call from the same person asking to speak with the head of telemarketing. i say "no way. i am busy." the caller tells me i am brusque, just like my other people. i say "i'm terribly busy. please don't call me again." the woman replies "you are really a jackass." again, odd, but so is the world.

then tonight i get an email from this woman's husband threatening me with a law suit because i have called their house a dozen times. my employees have cussed out his wife.

i go to the net, find the $200+ million a year telemarketer outfit, cross marketing, and send the URL back to the husband.

this world has too many people with short fuses and, apparently, too many marketing people named jay cross.

when uta and i were in chicago last week, we spent a day touring frank lloyd wright houses in oak park. my shorthand observations on the wright way to do things:

organic architecture -- holistic
room within a room
flow from one room/space to the next
built-in's to create space
central fireplace, the hearth, "inglenook"
view of nature, skylights
shelves for display
indirect light
contrast: light/dark. confined/open.
horizontal lines
break out of the box
surprise and whimsy: hidden entrances, tall ceilings

Gonzo Marketing by Christopher Locke

Gonzo Marketing by Christopher Locke

It took me a while to dig through Gonzo Marketing. It's fun. It's easy. It's highly entertaining. But if you know Chris Locke from Cluetrain, from Entropy Gradient Reversals, and from outrageous email from Rage Boy, it's not new.

Don''t get me wrong. I love this stuff. Hunter Thompson and Tom Peters rolled into one. Marketing needed a wake-up call, and Chris is an ear-shattering alarm clock.

The fact that Locke got Harvard Business Review to run an article entitled Gonzo Marketing, Winning Through Worst Practices, is simply staggering.

In the midst of writing my book on Implementing eLearning, I find myself quoting Chris a lot more than Philip Kotler.

At an architecture bookstore on Michigan Avenue, I found myself drawn to a slender tome by Kimberly Elam entitled Geometry of Design.

When I was in grammar school I must have been absent on the days they covered the Golden Section and Fibonnaci numbers.

The Golden Section is a rectangle with sides in a ratio of 1:.61803. Offer people a line-up of various rectangles and this one always wins the popularity contest. Take the Fibonnaci series, divide a number by the prior number in the series...and the results converge to the Golden Section!

The Golden Section also defines the proportions of the human body, the face, the body of fish, the facade of the Parthenon, and the posters of A.M Cassandre.

I find it utterly amazing that things like this lie beneath the surface of our everyday lives yet can go unnoticed. A fascinating read.

'Screen Language': The New Currency

'Screen Language': The New Currency for Learning
John Seely Brown

"I was a dinosaur," says Brown.

According to Seely Brown, there is a new kind of digital divide now and it is the divide between faculty and students. Faculty, stuck in yesterday's analog world, are confronted with students who arrive nicely fluent in digital technology and the virtues of hyperspeed. Students already have a handle on how to convey their emotional states electronically. It's up to adults to learn that vernacular, he said. Educators who create programs for adult learning and distance learning need to apply the vernacular and deepen and strengthen these new means of communication.

Use the Blog, Luke by

Use the Blog, Luke
by Steven Johnson in Salon

The true revolution promised by the rise of bloggerdom is not about journalism. It's about information management. The bloggers have the potential to do something far more original than offer up packaged opinions on the news of the day; they can actually help organize the Web in ways tailored to your minute-by-minute needs. Often dismissed as self-obsessed "vanity sites," the bloggers actually have an important collective role to play on the Web. But they're not challengers to the throne of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. They're challengers to the throne of Google.

...Weblog Bookwatch, which scans for Amazon URLs in new blog entries, and constructs a regularly updated list of books that are "top of mind" with bloggers. (An interesting corrective to ordinary bestseller lists, in that it measures which books get talked about, rather than which ones get bought.)

Seriousness is an accident of

Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists in putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke. Herman Hesse (1877 - 1962)

Anywhere is walking distance, if you've got the time. Steven Wright

Use the Blog, Luke by

Use the Blog, Luke
by Steven Johnson in Salon

But both Blogdex and Bookwatch share a conceptual limitation with most individual blogs, a limitation that is hard-wired into the software used by the great majority of webloggers: They are organized around time.

Time is central to the philosophical DNA the blogs share with journalism: Both compulsively feature today's link, today's controversy, today's top books. This might seem like an obvious organizational principle, but it comes with great restrictions. Google, for instance, is largely oblivious to time: When you use Google, you're usually not looking for up-to-the-minute info, you're looking for authority and depth. (Try getting a useful stock quote directly from Google and you'll understand immediately.) Many of the bloggers that I follow comment on links that are time-sensitive on the scale of a year or two: Someone's rant on the latest XML spec revisions is just as relevant next week, though probably not nearly so relevant a decade from now. But because those links fall off the front door every few days, they effectively enter a de facto oblivion, where I have to hunt them down actively three weeks later when I'm looking around for useful assessments of XML. The beautiful thing about most information captured by the bloggers is that it has an extensive shelf life. The problem is that it's being featured on a rotating shelf.

But the bloggers needn't be anchored to the headline-news mentality. Think of them as less like a newspaper substitute and more a kind of guardian angel, hovering over your shoulder as you surf. (The Alexa software created by Brewster Kahle relied on a similar approach: He called it a "surf engine.") Punch up a URL and if Jason, or Andrew Sullivan, or Sopsy has an opinion about that page, you see their comments in a floating window alongside your main browser window. It's a simple enough trick: Sites like Blogdex are already tracking blog-borne references to different URLs. All your browser would have to do is send an additional request to a database of blogged URLs anytime you pulled up a page: If there's a match -- if one of the bloggers you're following has referenced the URL -- their comments get sent back to your machine and appear in the floating palette.

[interesting riff on collaborative filtering via blogs]

There are almost as many potential ways to manage that new flow of information as there are bloggers providing it. But to open up these new avenues, the bloggers are going to have to shed their dependence on the traditional journalistic models: Instead of going to today's blog the way you pick up today's paper, the bloggers should follow us around, providing context and commentary, supplementing our libraries and our memory. Many blogs out there possess the standards and intelligence of conventional journalism, but there are already too many of them to keep track of the way we subscribe to old-style magazines or habitually tune in to favorite TV networks. If the blogging population expands at the current rate, soon enough you'll be able to spend an entire day just reading the front doors of all your bookmarked blogs. Better to do away with the dependence on front doors, and let your favorite bloggers come to you.

Zeitgeist Explained... zeit·geist | Pronunciation:

Zeitgeist Explained...
zeit·geist | Pronunciation: 'tsIt-"gIst, 'zIt | Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date: 1884 | Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era

Shamelessly ripped off from JOHO...

Shamelessly ripped off from JOHO...

A mathematician walks into a room where the drapes are on fire. He notices a bucket of water on the floor nearby. He says "I know the solution to this problem," and walks out.

The engineer sees it, adds it to the bugs database, and walks out.

The marketing guy sees it, and walks out before a shaft of sunlight can touch him and kill him.

Faced with impending simultaneous deadlines on half a dozen projects, I decided to spend three hours last night reorganizing my bookmarks. The work in progress. The hidden aspect of this is the plan to move the structure to a blog so that I can always have a current, web-based set of link resources. This morning I've cross-linked topics.

Having a blogged link list makes it easy to annotate items so naturally, I plan to begin adding commentary here and there, sort of returning to the roots of blogging, as it were.

Creeping blogdom may be overtaking my site. I like Becoming as a tasteful model, with comments.

TextArc, an alternative way to

TextArc, an alternative way to view text.

You must experience TextArc to appreciate its beauty and potential. Just do it.

New frontiers in marketing Orbitz:

New frontiers in marketing

Orbitz: We know you already paid for it but we're going to raise the price anyway.

"You requested a fare including multiple airlines. The fare was presented to you as a low fare option.

We would like to advise you that one or more airlines on your itinerary have required us to issue paper tickets separately from the other airlines on your reservation. Please be advised that in the Orbitz.com website under ?My Stuff? the fare display may reflect only a portion of your itinerary, and separate pricing may be reflected differently than you were quoted on our Web site."

Oh, boy! A chance to

Oh, boy! A chance to make millions, if not billions.

Once again, my friend Mariam Sese-Seko has contacted
me to help her free up some frozen assets.

Odd that Mariam had to change her identity after the
French seized her chateau but that she persists in
spamming me and my fellow Americans willy-nilly.

The world works in strange ways.

FROM:MRS. M. SESE-SEKO

DEAR FRIEND,

I AM MRS. MARIAM SESE-SEKO WIDOW OF LATE PRESIDENT MOBUTU SESE-SEKO OF ZAIRE? NOW KNOWN AS DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO (DRC). I AM MOVED TO WRITE YOU THIS LETTER, THIS WAS IN CONFIDENCE CONSIDERING MY PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCE AND SITUATION. I ESCAPED ALONG WITH MY HUSBAND AND TWO OF OUR SONS TIMOTHY AND BASHER OUT OF DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO (DRC) TO ABIDJAN,COTE D'IVOIRE WHERE MY FAMILY AND I SETTLED, WHILE WE LATER MOVED TO SETTLED IN MORROCO WHERE MY HUSBAND LATER DIED OF CANCER DISEASE.

HOWEVER DUE TO THIS SITUATION WE DECIDED TO CHANGED MOST OF MY HUSBAND'S BILLIONS OF DOLLARS DEPOSITED IN SWISS BANK AND OTHER COUNTRIES INTO OTHER FORMS OF MONEY CODED FOR SAFE PURPOSE BECAUSE THE NEW HEAD OF STATE OF (DR) MR LAURENT KABILA HAS MADE ARRANGEMENT WITH THE SWISS GOVERNMENT AND OTHER EUROPEAN COUNTRIES TO FREEZE ALL MY LATE HUSBAND'S TREASURES DEPOSITED IN SOME EUROPEAN COUNTRIES. HENCE MY CHILDREN AND
I DECIDED LAYING LOW IN AFRICA TO STUDY THE SITUATION TILL WHEN THINGS GETS BETTER, LIKE NOW THAT PRESIDENT KABILA IS DEAD AND THE SON TAKING OVER (JOSEPH KABILA).

ONE OF MY LATE HUSBAND'S CHATEAUX IN SOUTHERN FRANCE WAS CONFISCATED BY THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT, AND AS SUCH I HAD TO CHANGE MY IDENTITY SO THAT MY INVESTMENT WILL NOT BE TRACED AND CONFISCATED. I HAVE DEPOSITED THE SUM OF EIGHTEEN MLLION UNITED STATE DOLLARS (US$I8,000,000,00.) WITH A SECURITY COMPANY , FOR SAFEKEEPING. THE FUNDS ARE SECURITY CODED TO PREVENT THEM FROM KNOWING THE CONTENT. WHAT I WANT YOU TO DO IS TO INDICATE YOUR INTEREST THAT YOU WILL ASSIST US BY RECEIVING THE MONEY ON OUR BEHALF. PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE THIS MESSAGE, SO THAT I CAN INTRODUCE YOU TO MY FAMILY ATTORNEY (BISI MUSTAPHA) WHO HAS THE OUT MODALITIES FOR THE CLAIM OF THE SAID FUNDS. I WANT YOU TO ASSIST IN INVESTING THIS MONEY, BUT I WILL NOT WANT MY IDENTITY REVEALED. I WILL ALSO WANTTO BUY PROPERTIES AND STOCK IN MULTI-NATIONAL COMPANIES AND TO ENGAGE IN OTHER SAFE AND NON-SPECULATIVE INVESTMENTS. MAY I AT THIS POINT EMPHASISE THE HIGH LEVEL OF CONFIDENTIALITY, WHICH THIS BUSINESS DEMANDS, AND HOPE YOU WILL NOT BETRAY THE TRUST AND CONFIDENCE, WHICH I REPOSE IN YOU.

IN CONCLUSION, IF YOU WANT TO ASSIST US , MY ATTORNEY SHALL PUT YOU IN THE PICTURE OF THE BUSINESS, TELL YOU WHERE THE FUNDS ARE CURRENTLY BEING MAINTAINED AND ALSO DISCUSS OTHER MODALITIES INCLUDING REMUNERATION FOR YOUR SERVICES. FOR THIS REASON KINDLY FURNISH US YOUR CONTACT INFORMATION, THAT IS YOUR PERSONAL TELEPHONE AND FAX NUMBER FOR CONFIDENTIAL PURPOSE AND ACKNOWLEDGE RECEIPT OF THIS MAIL USING THE ABOVE EMAIL
ADDRESS.


BEST REGARDS,

MRS M. SESE SEKO

I understand that hundreds of suckers actually reply to crap like this.

tools, at the complete guide

tools, at the complete guide to weblogs

The Weblogging Tool Roundup on Web Monkey

Probably more fun to track out-of-favor buzzwords:

Our concept of books is

Our concept of books is obsolete.

Nonfiction books are an anachronism. Times change and they do not. They do not benefit from their readers' insights.

It drives me nuts that in this day and age we still create books in the format defined by an Italian publisher more than five hundred years ago. A text. No highlighting or pointers to differentiate important stuff from trivial. Totally linear, beginning to end. One and only one path through the material. Self-contained, lacking connections to the world outside.

An alternative to the book, let's call it a newbook would allow for marginal comments, discussion among readers, links to related subjects, and author updates. Content would be presented in word and picture. Graphic layout will be more akin to a magazine or well-planned website than to the tradiitonal book.

A newbook would improve over time. New and ever-improved content might be available by subscription.

If I can figure out how to do this, I'd like to give it a try with Marketing eLearning, which should be out in early October.