This was my first time at CFUnited and frankly my first time attending a conference of any sort. It was a new experience to me and was definitely fun and informative. Readers of The Sports Guy may be familiar with his “ramblings” and “running diary” columns. Those are my blueprints for this post as there are a lot of small things I wanted to touch on. Some are technology related, some are just observations.

Here for your enjoyment is my Bill Simmons-esque ramblings on CFUnited…

Thursday:

Wow, Baltimore is so quiet & peaceful at 5:30 am.

Haven’t had a McGriddle in years… I think the McGriddle technology is the same as that which created the little toy dinosaurs that expand in water. The breakfast sandwich is about the size of a hockey puck but somehow magically expands into a cinder block when it hits your stomach. My normal confident strut has become a slow waddle…
  

… birds of a feather…

[More]

Team CM is super happy to announce that Jeffrey and Sarah had a little baby boy yesterday evening in Minneapolis!

Otto [TBD] Rudolf - what a cool name!
8 lbs. 3 oz.
21 in.

Everyone is healthy, happy and resting at the hospital!

That's it for now. I'm sure there will be some online galleries available soon.

Thanks, Dan

My friend, R, instant messaged me earlier today, with the following geek joke:

Q: How do you bury a programmer?
A: Face down, nine-edge first.

Not understanding the joke (and thus completely missing out on the absurd humor), but also not wanting R to know that I was completely clueless, I immediately switched to FireFox and Googled the punch-line.

The first (and only) link I followed led me to the website everything₂ - a veritable mish-mash of random factoids and miscellaneous lore - which happened to have the answer I was looking for: "Face down, nine-edge first is the proper way to insert card decks in the IBM 1402 and 1622 punch card readers."

What's great about this random discovery, however, beside the quick history lesson, is that the explanation went on to tell me that this phrase is used in a geek poem called "The Last Bug", hearkening back to the far-distant, dark, dusty days of punch card computing...

Ah, to stumble around the Internet and find a wonderful, random, old post like this.  It takes me back to the days of scowering the racks at the college library for books that hadn't been checked out since the early 1900s.

But I digress.  So, I IM-ed R back a link to the poem, thanking that dark overlord Google for pulling the weight of my obvious geek-slackerness.

Let's recycle our magazines! I was getting ready to throw some away last night and realized that instead of dumping them, I could share them with the Team at Congruent Media.

If you're interested, start bringing in your magazines after you're done with them. If you're like me, you browse through them when they arrive, then hardly ever reference them again. I'm sure we have a quite a variety being delivered to our homes that other team members would be interested in.

I'll start with late copies of Boating World, Money Magazine and Real Simple Travel. They're now with the regular business publications we get. Help yourself and enjoy!

IMPORTANT UPDATE
Almost immediately after this blog was posted, Nalgene announced they will be pulling their hard plastic bottles made with bisphenol A (BPA) due to growing consumer concern over whether the chemical poses a health risk. Read the article here.

We've since canceled our recent order in response to the concern, and are now researching BPA-free water bottle options. Stay tuned for more on our quest for the absolute perfect water bottle.
 

THE TASK:
Order spiffy new water bottles with a shiny new Congruent Media logo

THE CHALLENGE:
Whether you're an avid water drinker or an athlete replenishing fluids, you probably know how difficult it can be to find the perfect water bottle. When we ordered our last round, we found a handful of defects that made the normally refreshing act of drinking water, well... not so much fun:

The Gleek Effect
When Dan Dawes, founding Partner at CM, went to take his very first sip from the last order of water bottles, he had the extremely unpleasant experience of being gleeked upon - by his own bottle! We thought you were supposed to drink your water, not wear it!

The Helpless Hand Holder
Version 1.0 of our water bottles included a strap from the cap to the lid that’s intended purpose is two-fold:

1. Make sure the user doesn’t misplace or lose the cap to their water bottle, and
2. Give the user a handy little mechanism for toting the bottle from location to location

The problem? The straps started to break within just a couple of uses - not very reliable, and certainly not handy.

Flavors That Weren't Meant to Be
Drinking water should be a pure, refreshing experience. So why did water from our old bottles taste like it came from the kitchen sink? We read up on terms like "chemical leaching" and "flavor residue" and decided that drinking water just wasn't meant to be like this.

Logo? Uh, No-Go
Rule #1 of promotional item printing: make sure the client's logo looks good and that it's applied correctly. There's really not much more to say about that!

THE SEARCH
With all of these defects in mind, we set out to find the perfect water bottle. Meet our contestants:

	Contestant 1: This water bottle had odd, angled ridges on the side, presumably to help with gripping its massive girth. Those of us with smaller hands were not so ergonomically pleased with this design. Plus the aforementioned "handy strap" was merely a little nub of a loop that only a small tike's finger could fit into.
	Contestant 2: This water bottle was a little too complicated for our taste - the top looked eerily like a hand grenade, and it should have come with an instruction booklet for use.
	Contestant 3: This water bottle was getting closer to "just right" - the ergonomic shape made it easy to grip, it had the all-important handy strap, and it even included a measuring tool on the side for people that like to create mixtures or using training supplements. Still, the handy strap was just a bit on the massive side and looked like it could accidentally get hooked on something that one wouldn't necessarily want to be attached to...

Contestant(s) 4:
Last but not least, we had the good old, tried and true Nalgene bottle. We ordered two samples of this bottle - one smaller 16 ounce bottle with a narrow mouth, and a 32 ouncer with the larger mouth for those of us who really love our water. These samples were the last to come in, but when they did, it was pretty evident that we'd found our winner. This option offered *seemed to offer* a little bit of everything - it was virtually odorless, had the handy strap, featured the measuring tool, and we could even order a neat little splash guard to minimize the gleak effect we experienced with our old water bottles! Though they were a little bit more of an investment, they proved the old cliché that you sometimes you really do get what you pay for - plus, our clients are worth it! Unfortunately, Nalgene just announced they are pulling this line of bottles due to concerns over the chemical BPA, so we're forced to seek out a better, healthier option for our clients - more to come soon!

Ryan did an interview with Daniel Sernovitz of the Baltimore Business Journal a couple of weeks ago and the article came out in this week's edition. You can view it here (subscription required). It's a nice article on what companies are doing to help reduce the amount of stress in the workplace -- especially in very deadline-driven businesses like ours.

Featured prominently in the big color photo are Ryan and a few team members having a good time playing some foosball. It's a friendly game as you can tell from all of the smiling faces, as most are.

Sometimes though, the competition gets a bit heated after work as you can see in this shot as Eric chalks up the winning goal as Sean looks down in disbelief. I think this particular game may have actually caused some stress for Sean :)

As I was driving through Canton on Boston Street on my way home from work, a very familiar logo with the words "Coming Soon" caught my eye. Could it be? That sweet little taste of Washington, DC was about to arrive to my new home city of Baltimore? I took a quick second glance, nearly rear-ending the car in front of me, and my excitement was confirmed. Cake Love was coming to Baltimore! And then it occurred to me: how ever will I be able to drive by without making a stop?

For those of you not familiar with Warren Brown and the fabulous little bakery he started along the U Street Corridor of Washington, DC, you MUST familiarize yourself. You will not be able to stay away. The delectable buttery frosting about a 1/2" thick atop a moist cupcake, offered in several flavors, melts in your mouth and is instantly absorbed by the taste buds.

So please enjoy, but do keep in mind that neither I nor Congruent Media can be held accountable for any buttery frosting and moist cake addiction that may ensue upon your very first Cake Love experience.

3 years? 4 years? It feels like forever really. We were constant companions. There were very few times when we weren’t together. And during those tough times of separation I was absolutely lost. Like an old man in a rowboat dropped smack dab in the middle of the Pacific… with no compass, no oars, bad arthritis, no heart medication, and I was terribly alone.

No, you didn’t just click a broken link and stumble onto some sad sap who’d just been dumped (first of all, broken links don’t’ happen here at Congruent Media) (second of all, one needs enough game to first be with a girl in order to then be dumped). I am talking of course about my iPod. Although I’ve become so attached to it I should probably reference it as a WePod, UsPod or YouCompleteMePod.

A few days ago (*trembling as I type this*) it gave me a major scare that had me re-evaluate my connection to this device, my priorities and my life (well, mostly just my connection to the iPod, but there is a valuable life lesson).

“You Had Me At Hello” – Jerry McGuire
(sort of)

Years ago, I sneered at the people bragging about their iPods. Their little white wires coming out of their cutesy white earpieces. “Why waste money on something like that?” I thought. I had my 3 phone-book-sized cd books…filled in completely random order… scattered throughout my house… or my car… maybe my work. They were SOMEWHERE where I could find them EVENTUALLY. Sure, there were some CDs under my car’s front seat… behind my stereo… in my couch cushions… such realities are life!! I couldn’t fathom ever needing one of those pompous, elitist devices.

Well, needless to say, a BestBuy gift certificate and a cheap, refurbished ipod was all it took. And I became firmly entrenched in a deep and committed iPod relationship. No matter what was happening in the world I know that in my pocket I had access to my Zappa bootlegs, my Tom Waits, my Gong and my old Howard Stern show mp3s. Like any relationship, it is a give and take- I provide the iPod a power supply (and great music) and it provides me with hours of musical joy every day. And also like any relationship, nothing is perfect (“men are from mars and women are from venus” right?). You have to make compromises – sure sometimes it freezes on me… new iTunes releases are sometimes a bit suspect… iTunes files are copy protected… I’ve had to return & replace it twice while under warrantee. But all of this is a small price to pay for the joy that it brings me. And like all relationships, there are some bumps in the road.

But this is what happened… last week my iPod died and wouldn’t start up and I feared that it’s played “Call Any Vegetable” for the last time.

“A relationship, I think, is like a shark, you know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.” – Woody Allen

So I was looking into getting a replacement and I was talking to my buddy Tony. He’s got a different brand mp3 player. I’m always talking to people about music and musical devices so I asked him about his when I saw it in his car. All I heard when I asked about an mp3 player is “its an iPod” or “its ‘something-that’s-not-an-iPod’”. If it was the latter, I felt sorry for them.

“That poor guy” I thought. “He has one of 2 problems… either he knows he is stuck with an inferior mp3 player or the sap is too uninformed to realize how much better an iPod is!” This internal thought was often followed by wild guffaws of laughter (then uncomfortableness at the awkward stares I received).

So I humored Tony and asked him about his device. As he ran down the list of features I processed them in my standard way- either “iPods already have that” or “iPods don’t have it, but why would anyone need it?”. He predictably ran through a few features of his player that iPods also have (as I mocked him internally). Then he said a few more things.

“Bigger screen than the iPod” – wha?

“FM Tuner” – dag. I’ve always wished I could get the radio on my iPod.

“Subscription service for unlimited music” – grrrrrrrr

I tried to rationalize my envy by thinking I was like Clark Griswald being wooed by the Ferrari-driving Christie Brinkley in the original (and only, in my opinion) Vacation. Sure, his mp3 player was sexy, exciting and tempting. But the iPod is my Beverly D’Angelo. Solid. Not drop-dead gorgeous, but easy on the eyes. (mostly)Dependable. The mother of my children- Rusty and Audrey (scratch that). Let’s face it, my life partner. I couldn’t stray from someone that’s done so much for me, could I? Or is it possible that in addition to my iPod's death, that a piece of my heart died? The piece that has fueled my blind love for this device.

“Don’t hate the playa – Hate the game.” – Many of my Ex-Girlfriends (*sob*)

Well, the good news after 2 solid days of charging, my iPod is back to life (although still having blackout fits). So what did I decide? I’ve decided to become an mp3 player bigamist. I checked out Napster and Rhapsody (unlimited monthly music subscription services) and I MUST HAVE THEM. (well one or the other). They offer not only the standard rock music but a great selection of Jazz/Classical/International, too. Stuff I feel like I’ve only barely listened too. There's so much to explore. I’m sure once I get used to having that RIDICULOUS amount of music at my disposal I won’t be able to live without THAT (until something even better inevitably comes along in a few years/months/days).

In short, I’ve opened my mind and gotten over my iPod fanboy attitude.

“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible”- Frank Zappa.

And here’s the lesson, and I think it also applies to business, relationships and life in general… you can’t be afraid of change. Or even better: Its foolish to let “fear of change” be the obstacle that keeps you from bettering your own situation. The ONLY way to better ones self/situation is by taking that first step. Every minute of every day we are constantly thinking… thinking becomes movement … movement becomes action … action becomes experiencing… experiencing becomes learning… learning becomes evolving… and evolving is LIVING. So that’s what life is all about- that first step towards change.

Live(step) well! 

-Eric                                        

Brad is a human barometer for what is hip and happening in the social sphere of the net. I’ve waded through a slew of theories on where he draws this knowledge, and after careful analysis have discovered the source of his wisdom: a perpetually swaying, solar-powered, plastic plant residing on his desk. (It’s cool Brad, your secret’s safe with me.) I believe he acquired this mystical object from a highly advanced robot, who traces its genealogy to Voltron, during Brad’s time in Japan, but I digress…

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve routinely watched in amazement as a small grey box popped up on his computer screen notifying him of a new email in his Gmail box; each time he’s patiently re-explained to me the concept of Gmail notifier. Well this week I finally installed Gmail Notifier, and being the overachiever I am, went a step further and explored another Brad recommendation: Google Reader.

(For those keeping track, yes I just jumped from Gmail to Google Reader, and yes, there’s little correlation. I draw my inspiration from years of watching the Simpsons.)

I’ve been familiar with RSS feeds for awhile, mostly through customizing my homepage with feeds from favorite news sites. Reader, however, opened my eyes to the possibilities of RSS. Let me give you one example:

So there’s this guy named Craig, and he runs a series of digital community message boards; for some reasons he calls them his “lists.” Anyways, I often check the “computer gigs” section for potential projects, and I’d check in Baltimore list, the DC list, the Philly list and sometimes even the Peru list. (Hey, wouldn’t you like to sell a website to Machu Picchu?) I’d check each city’s list and scour through the posted project requests, trying to recall which ones I’d already read. And when I was done, a whole world posted new projects that I wouldn’t find until I repeated my routine the following day.

But with Reader, I could subscribe to each city’s “computer gigs” section and every new posted project came directly to me! No more need to jump from city list to city list. No more confusion over what was new. No more missing posts overnight. After plugging in a Firefox add-on, my browser would even automatically keep an eye on Reader for me. So I went from setting a daily reminder to check 10+ sites, to a tiny icon in the corner of my browser window telling me how many posts awaited me. In real-time.

Reader also opened my eyes to a challenge though. Feeds can be read directly in Reader, freeing one from having to actually go to the author’s website; more importantly, freeing one from having to actually read the product, pitch or advertisement on the author’s website. Some feeds only show the headline of a post, and some teaser lines, requiring one to go to the actual site to read the rest. Even so, it’s still allowing the masses in search of instant gratification to scan a site’s content without having to actually jump in.

What if Google mimics the business model of Apps and Gmail, and starts posting its own ads on Reader's interface. [spooky music] Would Google then be profiting off of others content? No I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat, why do you ask?

A few feeds attach advertisements within the feeds themselves, and thus the internet evolves. (Pssssst….we can do that for you!)

My mind being completely overwhelmed with the long term ramifications and endless new found possibilities of RSS feeds (yes I know this is so 2005), I’ve spent the week pacing by Brad’s desk stammering about how my world is forever changed.

Sorry for the interruptions Brad. There is a solution though: you could just give me the plant.

Do you remember the days when the Exit Row was fair game, before it became "Premium Seating"? Ahh, the good ol' days. Earlier today, I had the privilege of getting reclined upon during a flight back to Minneapolis. Ten minutes after take off, we heard the magic words: "Portable electronics may now be used..." Great! Time to bust out the laptop and catch up on some work. Unfortunately, that had a totally different meaning for the guy sitting in front of me. He heard "Trays and seat backs no longer need to be in their upright position". Boom, he was practically in lap.

I was able to wriggle into enough room to see my screen, but the whole incident made me long for Southwest. With SWA, you're only an "A" boarding pass away from the roomy exit row, where no amount of reclining will affect your ability to operate a touch pad.

Oh - and sorry to the guy who was stuck sitting next to me. It's all knees and elbows trying to type in that confined space :)