Total BS

I recently joined PhillyCarShare, primarily for travel related to work.It really is surprisingly simple, except for the whole figuring out how to use the gas card thing. It took a call to figure out what the pin was. And then another call to figure out why the car wouldn’t start (it won’t start unless the gas card is returned to its holder). But I suppose those problems could’ve been avoided if I had read the manual in more detail. But their customer service was prompt and polite, so no big sweat.I’ve decided to use this as an opportunity to test drive all different sorts of cars. Today I checked out a Toyota Scion xB.Pros:

• It drive fairly smooth and is fairly responsive, especially for a car that’s somewhere in between a station wagon and jeep in size.

Cons:

• It has a weird size and shape that made me constantly misjudge how big/small it was. It’s too big to feel close to the road. But too small to intimidate other drivers. Ultimately, not ideal for city driving.
• It takes forever to accelerate. You can finish whole novels and movies in the time it takes to go 0-60. Although once you get to a high speed, like I mentioned it feels pretty steady.

My verdict: Good for those who need space or like reading or watching movies while driving, but I will never rent one again.

Just an observation, but Digg.com has degraded into a shallow mess lately. There’s very little interesting on there now, because every post follows one of the following themes: 

1. anti-religion
2. anti-republican
3. hot chick pix
4. collegehumor.com video
5. awesome picture!!!
6. hot chick video
7. linux story
8. ron paul (although this has subsided somewhat recently)
9. legalize mary jane
10. top 10 list

Ironically, this will be my first dugg post and my wordpress blog will crash. Prophetic.  

I’ve been impressed by Amazon this past year. If only I’d bought their stock back in the beginning of the year, but alas. But through their backend web services, such as S3 and EC2, they’re clearly branching out in ways that go beyond their core offering as an online retailer, but have the potential to pay off in a big way in the future, if they’re able to aggregate everything and connect it back to their products and services database. I’m also impressed by some of their higher visibility efforts, such as their DRM free music download store. So when I heard that they were also making an effort to a new sheen to ebooks, I figured, well why not? Who better? Well, after seeing this quick comparison, game over. Amazon’s product is broken and a complete disappointment.I’d start off simply with the design, I’m not sure if that gizmodo link has those readers displayed to scale, but regardless, the Kindle is clearly a rookie effort by a company that has had no experience in designing people-friendly real world products. A website is one thing, a physical item another (which by the way, I know Amazon gets much kudos with their website design, but I think the way they organize and filter their products is and has always been total garbage). Anyway, it’s humongous, it’s unnecessarily jagged, and it looks like a pocket protector’s best friend.More importantly though, for a company that’s been crucial in pushing Apple to open up their own music formats, I’m appalled at how much restrictions there are to using the Kindle. The EVDO is great. Everything else sucks. You have to pay to view your own files? Seriously? On top of the 400 bones they expect you to plunk down for this? That’s it. Game over. I don’t even have to go into the additional charges to subscribe to blogs and RSS or the fact that you can’t view PDFs on it. I’m still stuck on the fact that Amazon somehow turned the reading rainbow into some bizarro time-share nightmare.What a disaster.

I already knew that Amazon uses cookie history to affect the recommendations it shows you on its homepage. But this was the first time I’d seen it in effect so quickly… Literally a minute after I’d visited Wharton’s home page.

ESPN’s featured a “Fan Favorites” section on espn.com for several months now, I think. It used to be that I’d often see a pretty witty comment highlighted in their “Featured Comment.” Occasionally racy, but usually appropriately snarky. However, I wonder if ABC’s been tightening up the reins, as I’ve been noticing more and more that the featured comments are bland. For example, this latest incredible insight:Thanks “fans.” You sound just like the broadcasters now.

Bill Simmons wrote something this past Friday which made me reflect. someone asked, “Can you tell me why it is necessary for all the networks to have like 12-20 people on their pregame shows?” and Simmons responds:

“You know how everyone always wonders why networks make so many bad decisions and ignore common sense so often? Well, the problem is every network has too many executives, and when you have a lot of executives, you have a lot of meetings, and if you have a lot of meetings, those same executives feel obligated to come up with ideas for those meetings just because they don’t want the head boss to say, “Gee, that was weird, Bob didn’t come up with a single idea in today’s meeting.”That leads to people feeling obligated to throw out bad ideas because a bad idea is better than not having ideas at all. And there are times when everyone in the room talks themselves into a bad idea — mainly because they couldn’t think of any other ideas — and once the bad idea springs into motion, everyone starts working on it and eventually talks themselves into the idea.”

I’ve never been a fan of large brainstorming meetings. The larger the meeting, the more likely I am to mentally disengage from it.I understand the “noble” goal of large meetings is to throw out all sorts of crap and see what sticks and hope that whatever’s out on the table will inspire others to build upon it. Because simple arithmetic would tell you that the more smart people you have in a room, the smarter the room collectively gets. However, this rarely happens. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’ve never seen it happen. Like Bill Simmons so comically describes above, I’ve seen bad ideas turn into terrible ideas, I’ve seen good ideas turn into ok ideas but I’ve never seen good ideas turn into great ideas.My perspective is that great ideas never come from large meetings, because great ideas require continuous iteration and dialogue that you just can’t get in a large meeting. I do believe that good ideas can can result from these meetings, because good ideas can be conceived independently and be acknowledged as such. But then a lot of the struggle comes in fighting to keep the good idea, good, and not hodge-podged with any bad ideas. Ultimately, it ends up being counterproductive and fairly frustrating.Everything great has been born out of the vision and work kickstarted by a couple or a few people. I’m making that statement without any facts to back it up. I can, because I feel like it. But for name-dropping sake I’m going to throw out Google, Microsoft and Batman. Occasionally, greatness might be born from one genius, but for the rest of us, we usually require some help. I’m not sure if I’m in the minority on this, but I don’t know why more people/companies haven’t realized and acted upon this. My guess is that it’s mostly a logistics and politics thing.

I do my best thinking after 2am. Sometimes I do my only thinking after 2am. On some sense, this is somewhat frustrating, as it’s created a never-ending cycle of sleep deprivation. On another sense, as I’m writing down thoughts for a work concept, I can live with it… I just need a healthier food source at this time of night… and a sledgehammer in the morning for my alarm.

About a month and a half ago, I started work at Digitas Health after a 3 year stint at an agency called SFGT.My main reason for deciding to work at DH was because it was a big company, a subgroup of Digitas, which is a sub-brand of Publicis, an international, public holding company. So DH is probably a company where there’s something in some sort of manual that suggests that I mention that the thoughts on this blog are my own and not associated with Publicis, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Probably. Whatever. I’m cool with that, it’s that sort of idiosyncrasy that played a big part in my choice. Especially coming from a smaller agency background. Now I get to take part in those wacky HR training meetings that Dilbert and The Office have made so notorious. I had my first one last week. Emotions management training. It was awesome.Of course, there were other factors in my decision. For example, I didn’t have a particular love for Pharma. But I didn’t have any problems with it. Especially coming from SFGT where walls and boundaries on creative expression were nonexistent, I figured shackling on the figurative handcuffs associated with Pharma would be a nice challenge. Otherwise, the people, the atmosphere, etc., everything was cool, but this was pretty much the case just about everywhere i interviewed. So I always came back to the bigness. And DH had that in a way that none of the other Philly agencies really had. I just wanted to see what the difference was in a larger agency, and see if I could cut it. No reason to believe I couldn’t. Or for that matter, that anything would be really different in a larger agency. But nevertheless it seemed like a different kind of challenge.So a month and a half in, what have I found?

1. Bureaucracy is in. There’s a layer for every job, and a job for every layer. Theoretically, in a well oiled machine, it leads to efficiency. For the most part, I’ve seen this to be a case. And generally, this has been a good thing. But sometimes it can feel limiting, especially coming from a smaller agency where you wear many hats. There are cases where I’d like to be more nimble. In those cases, I wouldn’t mind taking the damn ball and running with it (credit to Keyshawn).
2. Consequently, everything is expensive. Obviously more hands on deck means more mouths to feed. But it goes both ways on the agency side as well as the client side.
3. On the flip side, many layers means plenty of specific subject matter experts. You don’t come across many of these in a smaller agency.
4. The pharmaceutical handcuffs haven’t been that bad. I assumed it would be impossible to do anything cool. To some degree this is sort of true. But it hasn’t been as bad as I feared. Perhaps this is because I imagined it to be like a North Korean style lockdown.
5. Everything is a little more regimented. There’s less of an opportunity to free-form. Although I keep hearing that my previous experiences weren’t necessary “normal.” So maybe free-formity isn’t ubiquitous in smaller agencies in general. But nevertheless, it’s an observation.
6. Wacky company-specific acronyms. Nothing different in a larger vs. small company. They’re all insane with acronyms.
7. Wacky HR training meetings. Like I mentioned, I only got to experience one so far, but that was one more than I experienced before. I, for one, dig them. In a Christmas fruitcake sort of way. A nice curiosity.
8. Corporate culture. Hard to put my finger on this here. It is indeed a bit odd going from knowing everyone well, to not knowing most people. On the one hand, the constant new faces are refreshing. On the other hand, working in a smaller agency was sort of like growing up in southwest philly, a formerly tight-knit area. And I loved southwest philly back in the day.
9. Meetings galore. Sometimes I wonder whether I’m getting paid to go to meetings. There are certain days where work is simply sitting in on one meeting after another. And actual “work” does get done until after hours. With that said, I’d rather take sixteen, 30-minute meetings than the one marathon meeting we used to have. The best meetings I’ve ever been in have never taken longer than 15 minutes. Cuz it’s bing, bang, boom, say your piece, get out and run. Once you get longer than that, you’re probably getting redundant. And if you’re going over 2-3 hours, that’s when I break out the solitaire.
10. … originally I wasn’t shooting for 10 observations, but once I got to 9, I figured why not. So… large agency, small agency, neither have been able to provide me with an omelette chef. I guess some things never change.

Blogged with Flock

I’ve noticed there’s a direct inverse relationship between my blogging and living. The more living, the less blogging and vice versa. I’d like to separate these curves in the near future.

Couple of weeks ago, I was thinking that with the increasing momentum around online profile management, that there’s probably some geek trend where people are naming their babies odd names to get a sweet search engine ranking. And then a few days ago, I came across a WSJ article that outlined just that. I should’ve called this earlier. Then I could’ve made claim to being prescient.Now, I understand why you wouldn’t want to me named Mike Smith or Jane Williams. But I’ll feel sorry for the kids that grow up with names like Jubajube or Hoobastank.Luckily for me, Brian Sim isn’t a super popular name. And it didn’t take much to take that #1 spot. But kudos, to the other Brian Sim, who without fail, kept taking the #1 spot every time I nuked this blog.