So often sports commentators make predictions at the beginning of the year and so seldom does anyone go back and see how they did.
100% of the “experts” picked the Red Sox to have a collapse of historic proportions win the American League East. A majority of them picked the Red Sox to win the World Series.
As a Yankee fan, I can only laugh maniacally…
OK, I’m on Google+ now. So I’m on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.
Facebook I almost never use. Not sure why, just never got hooked on it. If I want to post pictures I usually do it here.
I used to be primarily a Twitter guy. Twitter worked well for me for quite a while as a mechanism to just have a general sense of what a small group of friends are doing. But over time, most of those people fell off Twitter. So now on Twitter I’m primarily following bloggers that I like. But if none of my friends are actively on Twitter, posting something to Twitter is pointless. And I follow the bloggers via RSS so Twitter is somewhat redundant. It’s primary purpose seems to be to circumvent the NY Times pay wall, but there’s NYTClean for that. So Twitter is slowly dying for me.
LinkedIn is just a work tool. I don’t really do anything social with it.
So that leaves me with Google+. Some of my friends seem to have migrated from Twitter to Google+. So I’ll give it a shot.
Maybe I’m just not that social…
I’ve spent enough time pointing out that Mariano Rivera is the greatest closer ever. I’ll let someone else do it for me this time.
Congrats Mo. Greatest. Closer. Ever.
Update: The filming out front is for Person of Interest. As I walked out to lunch I heard a crew member shout “Fire in the hole!” followed by many people walking quickly away.
Very reassuring…
An interesting site that I stumbled upon is iftt.com. The URL stands for “if this then that”. The site is designed to monitor various social sites for you and if one thing happens, trigger another.
In it’s simplest form, it can monitor the Weather Channel for your location and send you a text if it’s going to rain tomorrow.
But with “channels” including most of the major players (Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Gmail, LinkedIn, WordPress, YouTube, Instapaper, and a bunch more), the combination of things you can trigger becomes more interesting.
And you can post a “recipe”, which is a template for how to monitor something, that other people can then use. Makes the site easier and also gives good ideas.
For example, there’s a recipe where you can automatically tweet a “welcome” tweet as a direct message to anyone who starts following you. Kind of cool. If you are tagged in a Facebook phote, it could be automatically saved to your DropBox. I could automatically tweet every new blog post (would that be annoying or cool?).
You can even tell it to give you a wake up call every morning.
Truthfully, I’m not sure how much I’ll use it. But it seems pretty cool…
I arrived to work today to see major filming craziness right around my office. All kinds of filming commotion out front. Our glass front door is covered with plywood. A sign on our front door says that bikes can’t be parked in the bike rack, they have to be in the basement (not sure if the concern is them being in the shot or them getting damaged). The sign says that an “action sequence” is being filmed this morning. Not sure for what.
I can’t really see much from my window, but I actually hear the guy yelling “Cut!”. Never a dull moment in Dumbo…
First an award from Business Insurance, and now Risk & Insurance recognizes Aaron Shapiro as one of the “Deserving Six” in Risk Management.
Why six? No clue. But congrats to Aaron. Origami is filled with award caliber folks…
We watch plenty of Disney Channel at our house and tonight there were several commercials where you just saw the Muppets doing an updated version of the old Muppet Show theme song. With no reference to what it is advertising.
My daughters know Sesame Street but not the Muppet Show. So I had to point out that it was a great show back in the day, and explain Kermit, Miss Piggy, Animal, the Swedish Chef, and all the great characters.
Which of course leads me to Google to see why that commercial was there. Apparently there will be a new Muppets movie around Thanksgiving.
But going to Google leads you to YouTube. So I have to show my girls old music clips from the old show. Tori loves it. And finally I get to the ultimate Muppets classic:
Tori doesn’t even know the original song but it doesn’t matter. She is captivated.
Let’s face it, the Muppets rock…
Sometimes I take for granted how simple technology makes certain tasks. This morning I needed to refill a prescription for Victoria, but I misplaced the bottle. So I wanted to call the Walgreens pharmacy. But I don’t know the phone number.
– I touch the microphone icon on my Google widget on the home screen of my Android phone.
– I say “walgreens locations”
– The software recognizes what I said and does a search.
– But since it’s my phone, it knows approximately where I am so it automatically lists the three closest Walgreens
– And since it’s my phone, it offers a button which the phone number of each of those locations that I can click and call.
Sure, all this location stuff has privacy concerns, but damn that’s easy.
The crowd going to the 9/11 reunion for our folks was simply huge so we had to go. I would have totally regretted not going.
But I wasn’t going to go without my girls. So around 2:00 the whole family hopped into a cab and headed to a dive bar in downtown Manhattan. I warned my daughters that they were likely to be bored. It would be a bunch of grown-ups talking. Victoria asked, “will they have toys there?”. Sorry kiddo, not that kind of joint.
We were quite late (it was officially 1-3) so when we got there, everyone had already arrived. We had pretty much the entire bar. It was fairly amazing. I spend ten minutes saying hi to the people in the front of the bar and Danielle is saying, “are you done?”. I point to the rest of the bar and tell her, “I’m friends with all those people”. I think she was a bit surprised.
It was a bit dull for the girls, but they were largely great. Of course everyone was happy to see them and Danielle heard “I can’t believe how big she is” a million times. Kevin Mei was particularly fun with the girls (he convinced Tori that he’s 15).
They picked out songs on the juke box and the bartender threw in extra money for them. He gave them free chips and the waitress brought Tori extra French Fries (she is a serious French Fry girl). The New York State “no kids sitting at the bar” law was not enforced this afternoon.
Aside from that, I got to see people I haven’t seen in years. Some more than 5 years. We had people from way out of town, really an incredible gang. It shows the power of Facebook because that’s how this whole thing got organized. One of the old gang, Eileen, even put together a photo book via Shutterfly with old pictures of the folks we lost.
So we remembered our folks and had a great reunion at the same time. Bittersweet, but overall a really good time.
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