What Is Noise

Step 1) Have great idea. Step 2) ????. Step 3) Profit! Apparently someone didn’t tell Twitter that Step 2 is “don’t fuck it up“. Twitter’s lack of stability and massive downtime lately has been pretty horrid. Rumors that they’ve gotten another 15M in funding are swirling around, but also rumors of technical incompetence there abound. Unlike somewhere such as 37Signals (or betahouse) they don’t have programming rockstars working for them it seems.

Yes, twitter has unique problems. They will require unique solutions. Until someone figures them out however, I think I’m going to back off using/caring about twitter. This is really sad. In the past year I’ve learned to love twitter. Yet, nonstop slowdowns, client bugs, downtime, etc have kinda killed it for me.

Maybe their goal and monetization plan is to get everyone hooked, claim that they can’t keep it up without charging for it, and then get everyone to pay since they are addicted like Crack. I think they’ll hop to Pownce instead. Speaking of, why doesn’t Pownce have similar problems?

Maybe they need to write the program in pure Ruby, or maybe they need to use a “faster” language like Java or C++ to write it. The rails community will surely cry if it comes to this, but it will likely be needed.

But either way, someone wake me up when Twitter has some degree of stability. Until then, I think I’ll just have to be out of the loop.

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I came across Weezer’s new video this morning. It’s basically the ROFLCon of Weezer music videos. While sadly there aren’t any people in the video or mocked in the video that were actually at ROFLCon (maybe a good list for next year?) there were plenty of memes to be seen.

Check it out:

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I’ve wanted to go to Harvard for several years. I shouldn’t say that it’s been a lifetime goal or anything, but I would rather like to attend their business school perhaps in Fall 2009, or at worst 2010. I’ve started a plan into action that will surely help me at whatever MBA program I end up pursuing.

Rich Helle and I each purchased the The Case Study Handbook: How to Read, Discuss, and Write Persuasively About Cases by William Ellet on HBSP. After going through that I will start independently working over case studies. I know that the in-classroom lectures and feedback would be helpful but this is a good start. I’ll try to write response essays as if I am enrolled in business school and post them here to my blog for critique. It might be tricky however as I don’t think I can post the original case study so it might confuse readers. I’ll have to figure that out. Seems to be a pretty good book so far.

Also, Rich and I have decided to start a negotiations group. We need to work out the details, but we’d like to invite other business-minded friends to join us in the study of the art of negotiation. Everyone in every organization needs better negotiation skills, so if you interested and in the Boston area email me and I’ll keep you in the loop. I took one negotiations class at Berklee but I still feel unprepared for it in the business world.

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Todd Davis, the tool that pimps LifeLock on the radio and TV got completely pwned in a massively ironic move lately. Lifelock offers identity theft insurance and protect. This moron runs around throwing his SSN all over the radio, tv and billboards. He claims his identity is safe due to LifeLock’s magical work.

Well as such arrogance never pays off and since karma is a bitch, sure enough someone managed to steal his identity and take out a loan in his name as CNN covered recently.

To get a sense of the type of tool this guy is check out their advertisement.

This also pretty much clearly shows that what they are offering is a complete scam, and just trying to get another $120/year from everyone by using scare tactics. Sure enough identity theft is real, but why pay someone to protect you if they can’t protect themselves

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Thanks to Sooz this Saturday I’ll be giving the Nikon Nikkor AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8G ED-IF a run through its paces on my D200, which I am rather looking forward to.

I normally keep the Nikkor 18-200mm VR lens on my camera, and honestly its a killer daily lens. The 70-200 is twice as big, nearly 3x as expensive and likely weighs 4x as much. That being said, it’s significantly faster and much sharper. The 18-200 isn’t ‘unsharp’ but it is certainly not razor sharp like this lens. To get any sharper you must go with a prime of some sort.

I honestly hope that I don’t like the lens TOO much, as it’s $1700 (actually over 2K on Amazon) and I’d rather not add this to my wishlist of photo gear. Ken Rockwell has some killer information and review of the lens. Err, and that’s his photo of the lens above.

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