Scott Yates

Scott Yates year-end wrapup

A quick post with some odds and ends for an end to an odd year...

• With Steve Maxwell, I finished writing the manuscript for The Future of Water, which will be published in the Spring by the American Water Works Association. Look for much more on that here, and let me know if you want to come to the party!
• I'm a huge fan of Brad Feld. He's a hugely successful founder, and now investor. I've been a successful founder, but haven't yet got to start investing in other companies. Someday soon, I hope. He often blogs about all the books he reads, and now he's teaching himself a programming language. Sometimes I wonder how he does it all, and then I remember that in addition to just being smart, he doesn't have kids. That difference became stark for me because right while he's learning Python, I'm learning a programming language, too. It's just that I'm learning NXT, the language that programs the LEGO Mindstorms robots.
• The robot was a gift from my son, who asked me a day later if he could have the robot if I died. I wasn't sure how I should respond to that. Anyway, if I die in some suspicious way, make sure my son has a rock-solid alibi.
• I had a rough go of it getting the software working, and had my first rotten experience with Lego. Turns out I had a bad disc and the software isn't available online (I know, right!?!?) so I took just the disc to the store to swap it. They told me I needed to come back with the whole set. So I schlep out there a second time with the whole set, and they give me -- you guessed it -- just the disc. Anyway, if you have any hints about learning that NXT language, let me know.
• One last note related to my son... He's been enjoying his club house most of this winter. Only now, when it's below 10 degrees outside, is it too cold. It doesn't have a front door, so, we'll probably head over to the best place in Denver for used doors, Bud's Warehouse. If you haven't been to Bud's you should check it out. Amazing place, a great story, and one of the true gems of Denver.
• Second Saturday Science, my attempt to have a fun activity for the family with some learning thrown in, is still on ice. It was lots of fun, and the gang at the Wash Park Whole Foods was very helpful, but I just ran out of time. If you have questions or interest in that, just let me know. The funniest thing about doing that for me was this: Friends of mine could never keep straight what Saturday of the month we had the event. The lesson I learned is that even if you put a message in the very name of your venture, the message may not get through.
• I'll be waiting once again for the Denver Public Schools calendar for next school year to get approved by the board. Until then, the current calendar has all the weird and wacky days off provided in a format that is useable. This is the No. 1 way that people find this blog through Google: looking for the DPS calendar.
• I've started doing some consulting and training about writing through the Murawski Group. It's been a real honor to work with this group, especially the namesake Tom Murawski. Tom's been improving writing for thousands of people all over the world for years now, but he still delights in clear writing. I'm proud of my small part in encouraging Tom to enter a poetry contest put on by the National Punctuation Day website, and he won! Here's his delicious haiku:

Time to eat Grandma!
Save her with a comma, or
She's yours to savor.

• One last note: With my longtime collaborator Wade Green, I'm exploring a business that will help small businesses create the blog content that they need in this Googly world. If you have, or know of, a small business that has a blog and would be willing to let us run some tests, contact me directly. Thanks.

If you are a friend, and somehow you didn't get the Yates Family Christmas Card by email, the fault is entirely mine. Please contact me so I can get you on that list.

And to friends now and friends yet to be, here's my wish for you and yours to have a wonderful 2011.

Wikileaks Shows Generational Divide (And a Startup Lesson)

The whole Wikileaks event is fascinating on so many levels. There's been ton's of great coverage. I've read lots of it, but there's one thing that hasn't really been said: This seems like essentially a generational issue, yet another sign that the world is changing fast and the Hey-man-let's-change-the-world Boomers are the ones standing in the way of history.

Let me explain.

For all the hand-wringing, the actual upshot of the leaks has been... zilch. No covert operatives have been frogmarched down the streets of Moscow or Beijing. No foreign secretaries have been sacked.

(In the funniest tweet I've seen in a long time, my old Spy Magazine colleague Nell Scovell said: "WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange thinks Hillary Clinton should resign. Does he know NOTHING about the Clintons???")

Clinton, of course, will not resign and neither will anyone else. If anyone was harmed even a little, all the governments and journalists so outraged about the leaks would point to that harm as an example of why the leaks are so dangerous. They've got nothing.

The only reason they are so upset is that they like keeping their little secrets. It makes them feel important. So far, however, the leaks show that the government of Russia is corrupt (Say it aint so!) and in most cases that diplomats have done a pretty good job. If all this stuff hadn't been leaked information, this "news" would be classified as "not news."

How is all this related to startups? I recently saw a presentation from one of the best startup guys working these days: Eric Ries. Ries is an advocate of taking the absolute minimum product that you can create and putting it on the web so you can see if and how people will use it. Then you learn your lessons, iterate quickly and keep moving. Someone asked him how it was possible to do this without alerting your competition to what it is you are doing.

Reis' answer was spot-on. In essence, he said that your competition is just busy trying to do whatever it is they are doing, and really won't be paying much attention to what a startup is trying to do in the same space. He said that you could actually take all the code you've written and send it to your closest competitor, and the chances are that they really wouldn't know what to do with it. So don't worry about them, Ries said, worry about your biggest challenge, which is to just do a good job of figuring out what your customers want and providing it to them.

So it is with all these "secrets" that are now out. They are only secret because of the legacy of the positions the people hold who are doing the communicating.

That's why I say this is a generational issue. People over 45 or so have this assumption that all communication is private. Gen Xers and younger -- the people who regularly post on the 'net where they are eating lunch -- understand that all communication is essentially public.

The reason there's been so much handwringing among the older parts of the media is that they liked the world back in the day when they, and they alone, would get to see all the private stuff and publicize it when they felt that it was interesting. The gatekeepers are just not that useful any more. What's useful is a search engine that allows anyone interested to find what they are looking for.

For those of you keeping score at home, gatekeepers are the Boomers, and search engines are from Gen X.

The person who allegedly provided all those cables to Wikileaks? A kid. The one calling for that kid to be executed? A presidential candidate, a boomer, who cloaks himself in Christianity. (Hypocrisy infects all generations, but its most friendly host is the Baby Boomer.)

So just remember these two things: First, if you really want something to be private, don't put it on the 'net. Second, ask yourself why you want it to be private. Chances are that if you try to keep it private, it will just make really boring stuff that much more sensational.

Movies that play with your mind

I went looking for this list, and couldn't find it, so I decided that I needed to make it. Here are what I see as the best movies that play with your mind and an overall sense of reality while you are watching them.

• Inception
• Stranger than Fiction
• Adaptation
• Memento
• Sixth Sense
• The Game
• Being John Malkovich
• Spellbound
• Time Bandits 

Why Time Bandits?

I'm including it without going down the rabbit warren of time-traveling movies. How? Easy. The plot of Time Bandits marched forward in one straight line. The things that happened each night to the main character indeed happened all through history, but it never changed the movie's timeline. See the difference? Remember the last Star Trek movie? Answer me this: By the end, did Kirk know his father? You can't really answer, can you? That's because the timeline of the main characters got tinkered with. That's why those movies in general don't fit on this list because the movies on my list play with reality without violating the time-space continuum.

Not included because I say they violated rules of the movies on that list:

• Fight Club
• The Usual Suspects
• Mulholland Drive
• Donnie Darko

What each of those movies did was violate the rules of the accepted movie-going experience. For instance in The Usual Suspects, the movie presented flashbacks that were not flashbacks, but were instead creations of the main character. As inventive as all the others on the first list were, they never violated the rules that we that movie watchers have come to rely on through the years.

Memento, for example, didn't violate any rules of the movies, it just fiddled with the structure of the timeline of the plot in a clever way. Memento was of course written and directed by Christopher Nolan, the man behind Inception. He said that he first had the idea for Inception while working on Memento, and that makes sense given how Memento both respected and tinkered with the rules of film at the same time.

(Notable for not being on the list is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I left it off for this reason: It just wasn't a very good movie. It's important to have some emotional connection to the characters. Without that, it doesn't matter how clever a movie is.)

As I mentioned, I was inspired to get this list onto the internet because I couldn't believe it didn't exist before, but two other things motivated me as well.

First was Roger Ebert's review of Inception. "'Inception' does a difficult thing. It is wholly original, cut from new cloth, and yet structured with action movie basics so it feels like it makes more sense than (quite possibly) it does. ... Christopher Nolan reinvented 'Batman." This time he isn't reinventing anything. Yet few directors will attempt to recycle 'Inception.' I think when Nolan left the labyrinth, he threw away the map."

I agree with Ebert that it will be impossible to recycle Inception, but I'm hoping that Hollywood will allow others who want to write totally original screenplays and then get them made into movies. If the genre of films that are truly creative grows, that's a good thing.

The second post that inspired this one comes from Johan Lehrer, who combined my overall fascination with neuroscience with my admiration for Inception. Lehrer points out that from the brain's perspective, there's just not much difference between dreaming and watching a movie, and that's part of what makes that movie and all great movies so effective. I think that's true of all the movies on the first list.

Taken together, both of those posts get me hoping that a whole new generation of filmmakers get inspired to create movies that take advantage of how much the ball has been moved forward with Inception.

That's it.

 

Oh, one more thing, having nothing to do with anything, but I couldn't resist.

Consider these pictures in this order:

1.

2.

3.

And now:

1.

2. 

3.

?????

Those of you that had teenage crushes crushed... Sorry.

I refudiate Sarah Palin!

I am not a prescriptionist. I embrace a living language as much as any modern lexicographer.

I'm also not a hater. When George W. Bush had nary a friend in the world, I still wanted him to do well because I wanted the country to do well.

And when he coined the word "Misunderestimate" I went along. The word filled a hole in the language, and was a clever mash-up. It also sort of summed up his presidency.

Now comes Sarah Palin.

In a tweet, she called on her tweeps to "refudiate" something. 

Several things...

First: To her credit, it's clear that she types her own tweets. That's good. 

(The alternate thought, that she has someone so inept with language working for her as a writer, is simply too horrible to imagine.)

Second: She saw it was a mistake and pulled the offense to the language. Good for her.

Third: She compounded the error in the worst way possible, tweeting this:

"Refudiate," "misunderestimate," "wee-wee'd up." English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!

OK, just to be clear: "Refudiate" may have started life as a malaprop, just as with misunderestimate, but it will die there. It's not a new concept and it doesn't have any kind of clear meaning the way that misunderestimate does. 

Misunderestimate is clear from the word itself. Does "refudiate" mean to refuse to repudiate, or to repudiate more? I suppose it might creep into the language incorrectly (see irregardless, penultimate, etc.), but I don't think it will. At least I hope not.

"Repudiate" is a fine word. As with all strong verbs, it carries any sentence smartly. "Refudiate" is risible. 

Palin's worst offense against language, however, is her invocation of Shakespeare. You can almost see the little hamster wheel spinning in Palin's head here: She learned -- during one of her brief interludes at one of her sundry institutions of higher learning -- that the Bard coined many of the words he wrote. She hung on to that little factoid for a moment just such as this. 

I can just... see her... sitting in the back of class... twirling her hair while languorously doodling strings of made-up words on the construction-paper cover of Introduction to English Literature. She hears that Shakespeare invented words and then spends the rest of the class thinking about how she is just like him but she is trapped in the cruel world of academia -- until a squirrel went by outside the window.

What she missed in that class is that there was no dictionary to consult for Shakespeare. The language had no guide then. If he wanted to write about a character who was something less pernicious than "cheap" he needed to invent "frugal."

So, I say that we repudiate "refudiate" except in one very narrow sense: If we find a person using the language improperly, and then claiming the mantle of Shakespeare in becoming a faux-neologist, I say that we rise up and refudiate that person in the strongest terms possible.

Sarah Palin, I refudiate you!

Denver Public Schools (DPS) Calendar 2010-2011 changes... Again

OK, the DPS School Board has approved another set of changes to the calendar.

I know some of you are readers of this blog for the DPS Calendar alone. The PDF from DPS isn't very user-friendly, so now I'm in my second or maybe third year of making one that works for families using any of the digital tools.

So, the changes are here. The biggest news is that there are no more of the "Late Start" or "Early Release" days. Also the winter break grew by another day. In all, the calendar is much less confusing than it had been before, but that 4-day weekend in the middle of September will be here before you know it so make sure it's in your calendar!

Just so it's clear: This is the work of one parent only, just doing my part for the digital world. If you have any suggestions or comments or whatever, please contact me.

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico 2010: Politics and Water don't mix

A few liberal writers have been critical of President Obama because his speech about the BP oil disaster was weak. I find myself agreeing with even more liberal friends of mine who posted on Facebook (so I won't link to them) that they thought that criticism unfair.

The mainstream media writers seemed to think that unlike the president's speech on race in Philadelphia, the speech about the oil spill didn't do anything to fix the problem. 

That's just dumb. Racial issues are issues of perception and attitude, and a great speech can help elevate everyone's perceptions and attitudes. The oil spill disaster is one of engineering and physics. No speech is going to fix that.

So, while I agree with my really liberal friends, I also find myself agreeing with conservative friends like Greg Walcher, who writes about how many of the solutions that really could help in the Gulf of Mexico are all illegal. 

And my perspective on the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico? Well, because of my book I see everything through water-colored glasses right now. I'm working on the chapter about what desalination will look like in the future, and so I've been looking at the volume of water in the oceans.

Bottom line: there's a lot.

The Gulf of Mexico is only the ninth biggest body of water in the world. The Pacific Ocean holds 283 times the volume of water in the Gulf, and still, the Gulf of Mexico is big. It's so big that even using the worst estimates for how much oil is gushing out every day, and even assuming they won't get it fixed until mid-August, the total amount of oil will add up to somewhere between a quarter and a half of one part per billion of the volume of water in the Gulf.

Now, I don't want to minimize the spill. The oil is a huge problem for all kinds of reasons, but it's mostly a problem on the surface (where most of the oil rises) and along the shores. In terms of contaminating the volume of water in the Gulf, it will add up to an amount that is way lower than the allowable amount of arsenic in drinking water. A drop in a bucket is HUGE compared to the amount of oil in the Gulf.

And as for the future of desalination of water... You'll just have to wait for the book!

--

By the way, totally changing topics here, but I've been doing a bunch of the research for the book using a new search engine, DuckDuckGo. Google is googly in lots of googleliciuos ways, but I've really enjoyed the clean results pages and summary results that come up on search results pages while trying to learn about the Future of Water. 

(I am not getting paid for the link, but I do want to spread the news, which is why I used a link that the DuckDuckGo guy set up.)

Hannah's Story

Those of you who have known me for some time probably have heard me talk about my niece Hannah. I typically don't share a lot of personal stuff on this blog, even though Hannah is one of a huge number of amazing relatives, but I wanted to share this story for one reason: The Children's Hospital of Denver is an amazing place.

Hannah has recently been selected as an "ambassador" for Children's. Among other things that means that my sister will occasionally give a short speech at events for the hospital. She shared that speech with me, and now with her permission I'm sharing it here:

Hannah's story, as told by her mom

My story started out in the totally normal way: I had all the usual amazement of my huge belly during a normal nine months of pregnancy. Childbirth was amazing and magical for me, but totally routine by hospital standards.

Hannah's first nine months were delightful. I still remember that during that time the most troubling medical condition I was worried about was that she stuck her tongue out so much. I actually thought I would ask the doctor about that a few months later during her one-year checkup.

We never had that checkup. By the time Hannah turned one she had a raft of doctors, and her tongue was not an issue for any of them.

It all started one January day. We were going to a lunch date, and Hannah fell asleep during the long drive, something I was happy about because it was part of her regular nap routine. As recommended by everyone, she was in a rear-facing car seat. 

Then something went wrong with my car. It had always been a reliable car, so I was pretty annoyed that I had to pull over. Looking back, I will always be thankful that the car did break down, and I wonder if someone upstairs caused the car trouble, because when I got out, what I saw made my heart sink. She had thrown up, and her eyes were rolling back into her head. Her head was swaying back and forth in a totally unnatural way.  I knew immediately that something was wrong.  Really wrong.

Hannah woke up some but still wasn't herself. A friend drove us up to Hannah’s pediatrician.  After a couple of hours, he sent us to a nearby hospital.

Before we went for that drive, Hannah was a normal, active, nine-month-old. Now she was barely able to stay awake. 

The hospital did everything they could think of to help my baby:  MRI, Cat scan, Spinal Tap, Oxygen, IV, Blood draws, ect… But nothing seemed to work and she seemed to be getting worse, not better. At this point Hannah was near the point of going into a coma.  She had blue lips and black circles under her eyes. With nothing else they could do, the hospital ordered us an ambulance and sent Hannah to Children’s Hospital of Denver.

 

It was late at night. We got settled in the NICU (neonatal intentensive care unit). Then a couple of hours later I noticed someone in a uniform watching Hannah closely.  All of a sudden all the lights came on bright.  Around 10 people in uniforms surrounded Hannah’s bed while a nurse took me to the side and said that my baby wasn’t breathing on her own.  She told me that they were going to stick a tube down her throat.  The tube would be hooked to a ventilator which was a machine that would push air in and out for Hannah. Hannah went back to sleep, but I could barely hold her hand for all the equipment around her.

 

The next day, Hannah became a little more responsive.  With this energy she did what all kids in that situation do, she kept trying to rip the tubing out of her mouth.  The tubing that was keeping her alive.  The nurses explained to me that they had to tie Hannah’s hands to the bed posts to keep this from happening. So then I could only hold her hand as she looked up at me, trying to understand why she was in such misery. I fought to hold back tears in front of her.

Then began a parade of specialists. Every day or so a Neurologist, or an Oncologist, or a Hematologist would come in, examine her, ask me questions, and order tests. Then we would wait for the results of the tests. Every time the results came back negative. She didn't have something that could be cured with surgery or pills, but she still just wasn't breathing enough.

During this time, I never left the hospital.  I was by Hannah’s side, or sleeping in the mother’s room in the hospital. Family members and friends came, and we cried many tears in the visitors rooms, and then I would go back and hold Hannah's hand and try to smile, read books, and make things seem as normal as possible for a girl tied down to a bed with massive amounts of tubes and wires everywhere, and strange lights and alarms all around.

After everything else had been ruled out, Hannah's attending doctor in the NICU, Dr. Moroney, had THE talk with us.  He said that he spent some time at home on his day off and might have finally found what was causing Hannah's breathing troubles.  He figured out that she had a rare disease called Congenital Central Hypoventilation Syndrome (CCHS). It is sometimes called Ondine's Curse, named after an ancient myth about a curse in which the subject can only breath while awake. If the person goes to sleep, they die.

Dr. Maroney explained that in his research he found this disease was so rare that there were about 400 people in the world who had it. Some needed a ventilator to help them breath at night, others 24/7. There was no cure, he told us. Hannah would need a tracheotomy, and a ventilator, and she will likely need a ventilator for the rest of her life. He said that this would be a life long marathon for us, not a sprint.

 

This was certainly bad news, but in some ways I was also relieved. I know knew what the path was to "normal" for Hannah, and I wanted to get on that path. I wanted the surgery to cut a hole in Hannah's throat as soon as possible, and I wanted to move on.

The Children's Hospital worked hard and got Hannah an appointment that Friday.  Some of you may know the pain you go through when your baby is wheeled into surgery.  Although putting in a trach is a very easy surgery, the clock ticking and tickling and ticking is almost unbearable. 

Hannah made it through with flying colors and by the next day, Hannah was visibly coming back to life.  She started looking and seeing me again.  She started moving her legs, tracking people and actually smiling. She seemed so happy not to have a tube stuck down her throat anymore.

 

At the time, my baby had so much tubing connected to her that it was hard to hug her.  But on the next day, Sunday, our nurse, Laurie, took the time (and I mean time) to get Hannah situated enough to let me hold her for the first time in weeks.  It was one of the greatest moments of my life.

 

Then we were moved to a recovery room. Before we had witnessed the brilliance of Children's Hospital in keeping Hannah alive, diagnosing her rare condition, and laying out a plan to get home. In the recovery room, however, we started enjoying the magnificence of Children’s Hospital.  Almost every day Hannah would get a present from the volunteer department.  Sometimes it would be a huge stuffed animal.  Sometimes it would be a box of crayons and a coloring book.  The hospital had game rooms where Hannah and I could go and play games, or play with playdough.  Once a clown came in to visit.  Once a cheerleader came in to give Hannah a necklace.  The magic of the Children’s made the next few weeks survivable.

 

Those few weeks were filled with specialists, each training all of Hannah's family how to care for our baby with this new reality.  We had lessons on mechanical gear that would keep Hannah alive.  We had swallow tests, function tests, ventilator tests, CO2 tests.  We had the most incredible, amazing, gifted, caring staff in the world that worked with us and with Hannah, and taught us how to take care of our daughter.  We had a lot of high tech gear, but we always felt confident with the support of the hospital and especially for us the pulmonary department. 

 

As the years have progressed, the pulmonary, ENT and the sleep lab doctors and nurses have become, at times, as important as our family. I would do anything to support the hospital and the people who gave my daughter back her life.

Now Hannah is a healthy, intelligent, lovely, gifted and amazing girl. She still has a trach, but it's now attached with a string that looks a little like pearls. We girls do love to accessorize. She still needs some extra care, of course, but she can actually hook up her vent herself each night, and we talk with Children's Hospital Staff all the time about how to help her develop and grow into her full potential. I'm confident she will grow into a bigger and better version of the wonderful girl she is now.

One time not too long ago, I asked an expectant mom if she was having a boy or a girl. She said she didn't know, and wasn't planning on finding out. She said she'll be happy as long as the baby is healthy. I thought -- but didn't say -- that it will be OK even if the baby isn't healthy. It's not easy, but you can still be very, very happy. I know I am, and I know Hannah is, too.

And just so you know, Hannah still sticks her tongue out a lot, and I never did ask the doctor about that.

TechCrunch Meetup in Denver

As of this morning at 8, nobody had volunteered to be the TechCrunch meetup organizer for Denver for the big fifth anniversary party. So I raised my hand.

I've been reading for most of those five years, and admire what Mike Arrington has done a lot.

And it's not exactly hard to get me to go to a bar on a Friday afternoon. I mean, I've posted on my permanent Scott Yates contact page that the best way to reach me on Friday Happy Hour is to go to the Pub on Pearl.

So, if you read this, I hope you can stop by starting around 5. But in honor of Arrington, let's not shake hands.

Google TV Backlash coming in 5...4...3...

It was just a year ago that Google announced Google Wave. The anticipation about the product was huge, as there was this promise that somehow Communication was going to be Better.

I certainly bought into that, and even started covering Google Wave. Then it came out in a limited way, and the buzz built up to a fever pitch. Then people started using it and the backlash began. Now it's fashionable to publicly mock Wave.

As for me, I'm still hopeful that Wave will improve communications a great deal. The more we think about how broken much of our communication is today, the more solutions built in or around or similar to Wave will make all kinds of sense.

I see a similar pattern coming down the path with Google TV. Right now the interest is red-hot among the tech folks. The TV people will be paying close attention. In the fall it will build up among consumers and then after the Google TV from Sony comes out... the Backlash. The price will be too high, the interface wobbly, the search results will be troubled. (Indeed, that even happened during the demo, as in the picture below from TechCrunch. MILF? Really?)

 

And just like with Wave, next year at the I/O conference, or perhaps even earlier, there will be some modifications announced. There will be even more openness. Little by little and then big step by big step, developers around the world will begin to figure out solutions that make sense on Google TV. 

So, there you have it: A handy guide to the next 12 months of the hype cycle.

Elena Kagan is gay. Or she isn't. Big media is, however, dead for sure.

Members of the Supreme Court are the pinnacle celebrities of the legal geek world. As Kobe Bryant is to sports geeks, Steve Jobs or (but not "and") Bill Gates are to computer geeks, as Justin Bieber is to millions (so I read, anyway), the nine members of the high court are big celebrities.

So it makes sense that lots of people are interested in them.

I remember when John Roberts was nominated to the court, I read a bunch of the stories about him. They all had an "info box" or a "sidebar" that listed the highlights of his work history, his education, and his family, which included information about his wife and his two adopted kids.

I did the same reading about Elena Kagan. The stories were similar, both had lots of details showing how brilliant they are, bla bla bla. The one difference is that there was no "Family" section of the info box for Kagan. New York Times. Washington Post. ABC. Nothing.

It's as if everyone in the big media is all saying at the same time, "Move along. Move along. Nothing to see here. Move along."

To learn more, I turned away from the big media to a gay man, a Brit, and a thoughtful commentator, Andrew Sullivan. He has a number of posts on the topic, one of the most interesting, I thought, showed that a relatively new technological tool from (who else?) Google makes it clear that lots of people are interested, and are making their interest known by searching.

Here's my screen grab from this morning:

Clearly I'm not the only one who wants to know.

If Big Media had done it's job of just reporting, rather than trying to keep information out of stories and hope that we don't notice, I'm sure those Google suggested searches would look much different.

Look, it's not that I hope she is gay or isn't gay. The reality is that I don't care that much, except that I care about the people on the high court; I want to know what sort of people they are. I can find out all kinds of details about what kind of music she likes (opera), what her nickname was when she was a clerk (shorty), how she dressed for her high school yearbook photo (in judicial robes with a gavel), etc., but I'm not allowed to know if she's gay or straight?

This post isn't about her, it's about Big Media, what my old professor Jay Rosen calls the "Church of the Savvy."

Indeed just this morning he pointed me to the best long story I've read in a while by the always excellent James Fallows. It's about the future of news as being shaped by Google. 

The quote that fits this best is here:

“Usually, you see essentially the same approach taken by a thousand publications at the same time. Once something has been observed, nearly everyone says approximately the same thing.”

That's from a guy who's been watching Google News since the start, and he is absolutely right. I used to be part of that church. I did well, but I always bristled about the idea of knowing something and not being able to get it into the paper, and so I had some mighty fights with editors, and eventually left journalism and started my own business where I could put everything I knew out there.

(By the way, continuing my ongoing series on how rotten Gibbs is as press secretary, he has completely flubbed the White House response. He screwed this up, as he has with so many other issues, because he sees himself as one of the new high priests of the Church of the Savvy, and can't quite figure out how to recognize that the world is changing. His boss does, but in this case I think both President Obama and Kagan herself have erred in trying to keep it all in the closet, so that does put Gibbs in a tricky spot, but one that he could have worked out of more gracefully than he did here.)

The story will only grow and grow, not because it's fueled by haters on the right -- which is whom Gibbs blames -- or anyone else with an agenda. It will be fueled by people bristling at information being kept from them. Those Google suggested words are generated by a computer analyzing millions of searches. There's no conspiracy, vast or otherwise, driving what people all over the world type in their search engine windows.

Luckily for me and for all readers the walls are tumbling down, and it is possible to find other sources of news that are not in the Church of the Savvy.

All Signs Point to the Fact that I am a Traffic Nerd

The first step to, I'm told, is to admit that you have a problem.

My name is Scott -- ("Hi, Scott!") -- and I'm a traffic sign nerd.

Last night the incomparable Tim Jackson tipped me to this amazing story of a guy who took it upon himself to fix an Interstate Highway sign in Southern California, specifically in Pasadena. The sign lacked what one guy saw as an obvious bit of information, so he decided to do a bit of performance art and fix the sign himself.

 

I actually knew that sign. My wife's family is in Pasadena, and I've driven under that sign many times, and I remember thinking that it didn't seem like it followed Federal Interstate Highway sign standards. I never said anything, thinking California maybe had its own rules. I also didn't want her family to think I was a total traffic nerd. 

Now the truth is out: The sign was non-conforming!!!!

Ahem.

Anyway, even though CalTrans knew about the citizen's modification, they didn't do anything about it because they knew that his fix made the sign better. When they finally fixed the sign themselves, they essentially incorporated his modification.

That guy had guts.

I was able to get one sign changed on the Interstate Highway system back in 2004, but I did it the old-fashioned way: lobbying Colorado's DOT to do the work for me.

At the time, I was operating MyTrafficNews, and a bunch of readers wrote in to tell me that a new and nearly constant traffic jam we were reporting about was not the fault of traffic, it was the fault of a sign. The story was that at the end of one highway a new sign gave people a choice of going north or south, but the sign telling people to exit on the right was to the left of the sign telling people to exit to the left. The result was drivers trying to merge suddenly at the last second when the realized they were in the wrong lane.

We took pictures and made a big stink. We submitted the pictures to "This is broken," then a great service of user-experience expert Mark Hurst.

CDOT, to their credit, had a crew fix the sign within a week or so of our campaign.

We had lots of fun with signs at MyTrafficNews. When a truck hit one of those Variable Message Signs, leaving it dangling and threatening -- as we wrote at the time -- to turn a Pontiac into a pancake, we jumped to action. First, we did our best to alert people, as the sign that was designed to help traffic instead made traffic horrible for half the city for an entire day. ("Don't these signs take a Hippocratic oath?" we wrote at the time.)

Then, we wondered what the sign would say if it could make its own message on that day. In haiku.

All signs looking down
Gridlock is all around me
I must blame myself

You see, I really am a traffic sign nerd. 

So my question is, what's the second step?

Welcome to the tt neighborhood, Twee.tt!

The unusual domain (sco.tt) of this blog gets as much attention as any of the content. When I first got it more than four years ago, I was wandering in the wilderness to some degree.

Then when Matt Mullenweg (the Wordpress guy) signed up for ma.tt, it made the neighborhood feel a bit more inhabited.

The domain had another great day when the incomparable Adeo Ressi praised it. (I wonder if that's a part of why he decided to open a version of the Founder Institute in Denver? Probably not, but a guy can dream.)

Anyway, now the couple of modest dwellings here in the land of .tt learned today that we are getting a new high-rise: Twitter is going to use twee.tt.

The story has only speculation, and the whole notion of URL shorteners is a weird one that I think we will look back on like we look back on "baud rate" now. Somehow I think the internet will figure out a way to eliminate the need for those soon enough.

But for now, it's a new bit of fun attention being paid to our little corner of the internet. 

Should I bring them a fruit basket?

Obama, health care, parents, and Field of Dreams

I'm a big fan of politics, and of movies, and I often think about politics in terms of what makes for a good plot.

The health care bill makes for a great plot. (Lots and lots of others will argue about if it's good policy, I won't do that here.)

First you have the whole political back story, the failure of Hillarycare. Now HRC is nowhere to be seen near HCR. Even a trip that she planned for the President had to be scrubbed so that he could push health care reform to home base.

But that's a minor backstory compared to the personal one: I really get the feeling that this fight was deeply personal for the president.

Consider these words from his book:

My thoughts turned to my mother and her final days, after cancer had spread through her body and it was clear that there was no coming back. She had admitted to me during the course of her illness that she was not ready to die; the suddenness of it all had taken her by surprise, as if the physical world she loved so much had turned on her, betrayed her. And although she fought valiantly, endured the pain and chemotherapy with grace and good humor to the very end, more than once I saw fear flash across her eyes. More than fear of pain or fear of the unknown, it was the sheer loneliness of death that frightened her, I think.

Clearly this was emotionally charged stuff, and while it's possible to get angry at cancer, cancer itself doesn't make a very good bad guy. Insurance companies make excellent bad guys. Here's what he said during the campaign in Dayton, Ohio, October 9, 2008:

This issue is personal for me. My mother died of ovarian cancer at the age of 53, and I'll never forget how she spent the final months of her life lying in a hospital bed, fighting with her insurance company because they claimed that her cancer was a pre-existing condition and didn't want to pay for treatment. If I am president, I will make sure those insurance companies can never do that again.

Think about that as you look at that picture above. To whom is his gaze rising?

He hasn't mentioned his mother in the speeches from recent days that I've seen, but I can see her looking at him in everything that he is doing, using the tools that movies have to pull off such things. And him looking back.

Consider this passage taken from his remarks the day before the final vote: "Every once in a while a moment comes where you have a chance to vindicate all those best hopes that you had about yourself." Sure, we all have good hopes for ourselves, but nobody has higher hopes for us than our mothers. I think President Obama swore to fight back against those who dashed the hopes of his mother and made her suffer with such indignity. And he did.

Look, I'm not saying this was a giant Oedipal play, or that President Obama has an unhealthy grudge. Remember, the best movies become great when the hero does something that saves the world AND rescues the girl or saves his family at the same time.

There are dozens of examples, but Field of Dreams comes to mind for me. Remember watching that for the first time? You had no idea that Ray Kinsella was saving his relationship with his dad until it suddenly became clear that of course he was saving his relationship with his dad, and saving the reputation of Shoeless Joe and, by the way, Following Your Dreams, Farming and America's Love Affair With Baseball to boot. 

Remember? Remember near the end when Shoeless Joe tells Ray, "If you build it, he..." nodding toward the catcher "...will come." Ray stands up, and says, "Oh, my God" and tells his wife that it is his father. You can see the lump rising in his throat. (I felt it rising in my own throat, I still do just writing about it.)

Ray then says a line that baseball fans can all appreciate for its profundity, even though he is so choked up he can barely whisper it: "Say it ain't so, Joe."

Joe responds, "I'm afraid it is, kid." Ray then quotes one of the lines from the corn that moved him to build the field, "Ease his pain" and begins to understand that it wasn't Joe's pain, but his father's pain. Joe then says, sounding a lot like The Voice in the final command from the field, "Go the distance."

Then the clip below picks up, but the part that's most related to President Obama is above. 

He went the distance, and eased her pain.

What a movie!

Techstars AND Founder Institute! This is going to be a great summer in Colorado

Update: Brad Feld/Jim Franklin just linked to this post, so I thought it might be a good idea to include an update. I'm now a Founder Institute graduate, and I've seen many TechStars company up close, and I agree with Brad/Jim that they are both great programs, and it's worth checking them both out. Note that the deadlines are for last year, they are different this year. Other than that, this guide is still helpful, I hope. -Scott

 

Colorado is going to have a great summer; the weather will be awesome and there are lots of great chances to hear music, hike, etc. That's always been the case.

What's new is that there will be two startup accelerators (we don't call them incubators any more.) The big kid on the block is TechStars, which has a track record that is getting up into the Harlem Globetrotter realm for win percentage. The program has done so well that it has expanded, but the Boulder program is the bedrock. Anyone interested in the tech scene in Colorado can tell you the energy and enthusiasm from the companies working in "The Bunker" is infectious.

I'm also now excited about another entrant, the Founder Institute, which was founded by legendary starup guy Adeo Ressi, who started TheFunded, a pretty disruptive (in a good way) site in the VC world. Adeo started that after a string of successful exits.

He's also landed a big name to be the lead mentor for the Denver version of Founder Institute, Jon Nordmark of eBags fame.

Now, if I think TechStars is so great, why did I apply to the Founder Institute?

Well, the answer lies in one of the items in the grid below. I'm busy enough with my other projects that it would be hard for me to get to Boulder every day for three months. Also, I don't really have an idea that fits into the TechStars motif, and I also don't have a co-founder. Most of the TechStars teams are just that: teams.

So I will be be attending the classes, and I have a new business idea that may fit perfectly into the Founder Institute system, but Adeo keeps saying that with Founder Institute it's really all about the Founder, and not about the idea. I've heard David Cohen say similar things about TechStars, but the application does ask several questions about the business plan, market, and the like. Even if the plan changes during TechStars, it's clear most of those accepted go in with a plan. I'll be going into Founder Institute with just the vague outline of a business idea.

There are other accelerators around the country, and they are getting plenty of attention, but I can't think of a better place to be than Colorado in the summertime.

Bottom line, Colorado is going to be an amazing place to start a company this year. If you want to be part of it, now is the time to check it out. No matter what your situation, there's an accelerator ready and waiting for you here. You just need to apply!

Colorado New Technology Accelerators A Comparison Chart
Name	Founder Institute	TechStars
Founded in	San Francisco/Silicon Valley; 2009	Boulder; 2007
Now also in	Seattle, LA, San Diego, NY, DC, Singapore and Paris	Boston, Seattle
Colorado application due	April 25, 2010	March 22, 2010
Cost of application	$50	None
Application	Personality/Aptitude test, LinkedIn profile	Background, business concept
Team application?	Allowed, but not needed	Generally needed for acceptance
Economics	You pay $600, and contribute 3.5 percent equity of your company into a pool that is owned by all founders and mentors in your class	You receive $6,000 per founder (up to 3), and you contribute 6 percent common / founder equity of your company to TechStars
Full-time in program	Not required, many keep their "day job"	Immersive, full-time for three months
Time Commitment	One night a week, plus extra work on your own, for four months	Yes
Companies in each session	10-45	10
Percent women historically	About 25	About 10
Average Age	About 37	About 27
"Big Names"	Jon Nordmark for Colo., Adeo Ressi of The Funded started it	David Cohen started it, with involvement and support from Brad Feld
Acceptance based on	Aptitude test, strength of founder; idea not part of application	Combined strength of company idea and team
Mentors	Only successful startup CEOs	Successful startup CEOs, VCs, lawyers and others
Also included	Free or super-reduced legal and other services from 40 partners	Office space in "The Bunker" in Boulder, some legal and other services

No Second Saturday Science this month

We've had a ton of fun at the Second Saturday Science events over the last six months, and I've learned a great deal.

For a variety of reasons, however, we'll be taking a break from the events at the Wash Park store. With luck, we'll be back soon with a big announcement. Until then, stay tuned!

The Future of the Future

A few months ago I wrote about some of what I was up to. It helps in a few ways to do that, I think, so here's the latest.

The two biggest bits of news are that I am writing a book, and I've been accepted to the Founder Institute.

First the book...

The American Water Works Association has been wanting to do a book for while that looks forward to all the changes coming over the next few decades in the world of water. So, the people there created a team of Steve Maxwell and me. Steve knows the water business inside and out, and AWWA is not just an association of water providers, it really is the authoritative resource on safe water. I bring to the team my skills at making complicated topics accessible.

One thing I know for sure already: The way we think about water will be changing -- radically -- over the next 30-50 years. You probably don't really think about water much right now. Most people don't. The ways that we've handled water over the last 50 years, however, just won't work over the next 50, and that's why so many radical changes are coming.

I'll work hard to make sure this will not be a depressing book, but it should be eye-opening.

So watch this space for an announcement about when you'll be able to pick up your own copy of The Future of Water. If all goes well, it should hit bookshelves this fall.

Next, the Founder Institute...

The institute is sort of like the awesome TechStars, or a few others, but instead of asking participants to to quit whatever they are doing and subsist on pizza and Red Bull for six months, it allows people to keep their day jobs while a new company gets rolling.

They are launching a Denver version, and I've been accepted as a founder. (I'm guessing I'll be older than the average student, and have founded two companies already, but I like the concept of this school so I will be participating gladly. I look at it a bit like continuing education, with a bunch of great potential side benefits depending on the kind of company I decide to start.)

I'm sure I'll have much more to report about that in the months to come.

In addition to those two big things, I'm also fiddling around with some other concepts:

• I'm working with an excellent Denver web design shop on an idea that has the potential to substantially improve the employer-employee relationship around the world. Can't say more now, but it could be revolutionary, and a great thing for workers and manager everywhere. Stay tuned.
• I created an easy to use Applicant Tracking System. A lot of businesses just get flooded with resumes when they post a job, and they don't have a way to handle all of the applications. Many of them just use a spreadsheet. So, I invented a quick and easy way to keep track of all the applications. I've never created a page and tried to have it ad supported, so this is my small experiment with that.
• I may have a small but explosively cool new application emerging in time for Earth Day. That one will be fun.

There are a few other projects in the works. By my next report three months from now, I'll tell you all about them!

Those who don't watch West Wing are doomed to repeat it?

Maybe this will become an ongoing series of life just being better on the show the West Wing as opposed to the real world of the West Wing. Here's my first entry on pardoning turkeys.

This one is more subtle, but watch at about 4 minutes into this video. With the polite tone that is befitting the setting, Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen delivered a stunning rebuke of a question posed by a senator.

Here's the better version. The sound quality is rotten, but it's the only one I could find on YouTube:

"The problem is that's what they were saying about me 50 years ago. It would disrupt the unit. You know what? It did disrupt the unit. The unit got over it. The unit changed."

If only Fitzwallace could have been there to smack down the senators.

Robert Gibbs is just not funny

I've said it before, and I'll undoubtedly say it again, but Robert Gibbs is not funny.

He really thinks he's the star of the show. He's not, he's there to serve the public, not turn himself into a celebrity.

Denver Public Schools (DPS) Calendar update

I just finished updating the DPS calendar for next school year.

This year they actually released it at a reasonable time, and didn't wait until well into February (after most summer camps require a deposit) to let us know when school would start.

I do this each year for myself, not wanting to refer to the ridiculously obtuse official calendar. (Do green-and-black checkerboards mean early release and blue octagons mean assessment day, or is it the other way around?) Last year I figured it could help a lot of other parents, so that's why I post it here on my blog. If there's something I can do to make it more useful, please let me know.

Unemployment Rate For You

I seem to be in a mood to attack the New York Times today...

A million people have been linking to this gee-whiz graphic about the unemployment rate.

I don't think that's actually useful. I think all it does is make people feel better or worse about themselves while killing a couple minutes looking at some eye candy.

So, here, for you, with the help of the always talented Peter Jones, is a guide that is actually useful, and will not kill a bunch of your time today:

What is the unemployment rate for you?

New York Times Makes Up a Traffic.com Scandal

A story in today's Times about Traffic.com would have me outraged, if I didn't know there was more to the story.

The story, "U.S. System for Tracking Traffic Flow Is Faulted" makes the case that somehow Traffic.com rigged the system and got a huge pile of government money, and then wasted it all.

(Full disclosure, I sold MyTrafficNews to Traffic.com in 2006, but I no longer have any involvement with that company. I was a traffic nerd before I started MyTrafficNews, however, and I still am, having just written at length comparing traffic services.)

The story cherry picks some bits from a forthcoming government report, but that report isn't available so we have to trust that the Times did a good job of analyzing it. I haven't seen the report either, but I'm guessing it won't be nearly as dramatic as the Times makes it sound.

The heart of the controversy is that Traffic.com secured a deal with the government that it would get federal money to install traffic sensors, and then share the data. Without this deal, there would be hundreds of congested miles of highways in metro areas all over the country that would never get speed sensors. That's the big picture, and something that is easily overlooked.

Now the way Traffic.com set up the deal, it gets to use a small portion of that data first, but share nearly all of it all the time. Here's my recollection of how that worked in the real world: Traffic.com would instal a sensor and then share speed data that would show red-yellow-green on the traffic flow to everyone, including any local government and even the Traffic.com competitors. Traffic.com would keep for itself and its partners the exact speed data in exchange for putting in the sensors. My memory is that the federal money paid for some, but not all, of the cost, so Traffic.com was putting in the rest.

The bottom line for me is that the whole world got new data that it didn't have before. That's a good thing.

It's the kind of data you see right now on Google Maps -- the color coding is all you really need to know if a highway is rotten.

But because Traffic.com had some competitors, jealous that they didn't have whatever it took to put that deal together first, they howled like stuck pigs. They were doing that when I was involved, and it looks to me like they are still doing it, which is how that hit-piece ended up in the Times.

That hatchet job, by the way, doesn't even mention the fact that expansion of the program has already been stopped. I learned that only by doing a quick search this morning, but the program was shelved nearly two years ago. So why this manufactured scandal in today's paper? Good question.

Now, Traffic.com is not blameless, but you certainly can't blame the people there for implementing a program that was approved by Congress, and running it in the way that Congress directed.

I wish the people at Traffic.com were doing a better job of singing the praises of this program, which is a huge win for people who want to know about traffic jams before they get stuck in them. Somehow now the Times has turned that into a bad thing.

As I said, I haven't talked to anyone at Traffic.com for a while, but if I did talk to them I would tell them that they should have spoken to that reporter, and told him that this program is providing great data, is working, and will continue to make more information available to more people than was available before. It's doing its job for the taxpayers, the people implementing it are being fairly paid, and the congressional mandate is being fulfilled. This is a government program that is working. 

Why is that a scandal?

What to Call This Decade? My vote: The Naughties

I've been saying for more than ten years now that we need to all agree on what to call this decade that is so rapidly coming to a close.

When I say that, I've been getting a response, most recently from the esteemed Jesse Sheidlower, that we've gotten through the last 10 years without a name, and so there's no need to coin one now.

I disagree! Starting next month is when we will need it most! 

I don't think we need it when we are in it, because we can just say, for example, "I don't really like the most recent music from Hootie and the Blowfish, I like what they released in the 90s." 

Now let's say that band releases a much better set of songs in the next decade. (It could happen.)

How will we say, "I liked the recent songs, and the stuff from the '90s, but not the songs from the ____s."?

My vote is to take the word used commonly by Brits, the "noughties" and give it a proper American spelling, and call it the "Naughties."

This will give a little hint about so much of the naughtiness that went on. (Insert your own scandal here.)

The naughties are (almost) dead! Long live the naughties!

Won't I get a reputation for being soft on turkeys?

I think President Obama gave some nice remarks, and delivered his laugh lines well, and was cute with his daughters. For all the blather, it's clear that the president is a truly decent guy.

And his remarks about how Thanksgiving started during the depths of the Civil War really resonate in this year, with so many people struggling and so many troops overseas. He just put it all in perspective.

But there's really no better turkey-pardoning bit of drama than this one:

The Mark Cuban Effect at DefragCon

The DefragCon kicks off in an hour, but the pre-conference get-together was plenty interesting.

I've been to a number of tech conferences, but somehow some of the dynamics always surprise me, especially what I think of as the Mark Cuban effect.

Cuban, of course, is the brash and bold entrepreneur who built up an early "dot-com" and sold it to Yahoo at the absolute peak of the market before the tech crash in 2000.

Now he's involved in all kinds of stuff, but is best known for owning a basketball team. The name of the team, the Mavericks, matches his personality perfectly.

Cuban is known in tech circles for having contrarian viewpoints, and issuing them as loudly as he can. For instance he railed against the Google acquisition of YouTube.

He's certainly earned the right to do that.

Now, I don't want to pick on DefragCon, which is actually much better than some of the other tech conferences, but it is still full of people who just love to do a "Cuban." They make loud, bold pronouncements about why an idea will absolutely not work, how it's been done before, or why some competitor will demolish the idea before it can get any traction, etc.

I ran into lots of those people when I was founding, then running, a web-based business dealing in traffic information. If I would have listened to them I never would have started the business, and I certainly never would have sold it to Traffic.com. 

Heck, I may not have even bothered to wake up most mornings. 

Yesterday I talked to a couple of entrepreneurs who spent good money to come to the conference to learn and try to connect with others, and almost upon walking in the door they got the full "Cuban" from people who have never built, let alone sold, a company. (I actually had two experiences like that just in one day. The other was at the practice session for the upcoming Angel Capital Summit. More on that next week.)

I'm not saying that every idea walking around is great, and a little pushback is always a good idea. But for the next two days at Defrag I'll be attempting to tunnel through some of the bravado and find the great stories of new ideas, and bring them to you on Examiner.com or on sco.tt. I may not get to all of them right away, but I will try to report on many of them.

If you have a great story to tell (not just a press release announcing with great fanfare that version 3.2 of your whatever has just been released) look for me and let me hear it.

Stay-at-home dad

It's true, I'm essentially a stay-at-home dad, and what's weird is how busy I am. Most of the things I'm doing are open to the public, at least on-line, so join me for any or all of it. I know you are busy, too, but it's like they say, "If you need a job done, give it to a busy person."

Here's what I'm up to:

• Getting ready for the second installment of Second Saturday Science.
  
  The first was a big hit, check out the photos on the site for more. We're expecting a similar crowd of kids for this month's event, so we will not be in the community room this time, we'll be right out in the cafe area. If you have kids from around 6 to around 12, c'mon by. It's a lot of fun.


• Doing some coaching for TheBlogFrog in advance of the Angel Capital Summit.
  
  This is a great new company doing something that is great now, and will get even better.
  
  Remember how comments on blogs looked about the same for years, and how they didn't really interact with people in the modern, socially connected world? Then IntenseDebate came along and made the comments make more sense, and connected the commenters to their real-world profile, etc.
  
  Well, you know how forums on blogs have looked the same for years, and how they don't really interact with people in the modern, socially connected world?
  
  You catch on quick! You guessed it, the BlogFrog team has developed an easy way for bloggers to plug a fantastic forum into any blog, and maybe even make a little extra money on it in the process. They've already gotten some great traction with that most discerning of internet groups: the Mommy Bloggers. Keep an eye on BlogFrog, I know I will.
  
  
• Attending and reporting on Defrag Con 2009.
  
  It's been a while since I was a full-time reporter, but I've been attending a few events lately for this blog, but also for my Examiner reports on New Technology and on Google Wave. It's something that's quite comfortable for me to do: walking up and asking questions, and trying to write something coherent about it.
  
  The difference these days is that with the Internet as cool as it is, you can actually create things instead of just writing about them. Case in point is that just last week I wrote about how Wave could be integrated into a conference, and today I contacted the chief Defrag Confrencista to ask permission, he said yes, and a few minutes later I had launched the DefragCon Wave. (You need to already be in Wave to see that. Sorry.)
  
  Wave is still in its infancy, but it's fun to try it out. If you are on Wave, be sure to contact me in that brave new world. My username is "scodtt" (like Sco.tt with a "d" for the dot.)



• Helping Bud's Warehouse with a new site.
  
  You can click the link now, but wait until you see the new one, it will be much better. Really the best way to keep up with Bud's until the change is to check their Twitter account. This in some ways is the best twitter account I follow because the information they get about new merchandise is so handy, if I happen to be looking for what they get in.


• Lastly, but bestly, I'm spending time being a husband and a father. Kathy is busy keeping the world safe for arts in education, so I end up picking up a lot more of the time with our son, but that's just getting to be more and more fun every day.

So, if I'm not as in touch, or I'm not keeping my Facebook page quite as up-to-date, now you'll know why. 

Do keep in touch with me, however, especially if there's something I can do for you. These days we all need to count on our friends more than ever.

Thanks for reading!

Best Length for a YouTube video

I'm not sure why, but I'm crazy busy these days, so when someone sends me a link to a video, I very rarely even open it, and if I do close it if the length on the video is longer than about two minutes.

Here are two that broke that rule, however. I just got hooked on them, and could not stop watching them until the end. Both of them, I think, are just marvelous, and keep me optimistic.

and

So, the best length for a video? The length needed to tell the story properly.

Must Pop Topics! (Or, Why I Can Write Lots About Google Wave, and Not Much About the Rest of the World)

There's a game I just discovered from the excellent game collection over at Good Experience called Must Pop Words.

The idea is that a bunch of letters in balls float down to the bottom of a window, and you have to type words from those letters. At first they float slowly, and then they speed up. If you get to 50 balls, you lose. As Mark Hurst describes it, it's a combination of Tetris and Boggle.

The interesting thing is that I do much better when there are only a few balls, around seven or so. Once I get up to 35 or more balls it gets really hard. You would think it would be the opposite because there are geometrically more words that would be available with 35 letters.

I just finished reading How We Decide, the excellent book that draws in all the latest in neuroscience to help understand how the brain works, especially when it comes to making decisions.

One of the experiments that the author reviewed had to do with choosing a car. I don't have it in front of me, so I'm probably going to butcher this, but I think it went like this: 

Some subjects were asked to pick the best car, and they were given four variables for each of four cars. Some of them were asked to study the grid, and then announce what they thought was the best car. Some others were distracted after studying the list, and then were asked in the midst of distraction for the best choice, just using "gut instinct." 

The group that was not distracted picked the best car based on the four variables. Makes sense.

Then, a different group was asked to study a list of four cars, but for this group there were 16 variables. Again one part of this group was asked to study the list and then without distraction they were asked to announce their pick of the best car. The other part of this group was distracted, and then had to pick using a "gut instinct." Here the results flipped. The ones who got to study picked wrong; it's just impossible to keep 16x4 things in the rational part of your head all at the same time.

The emotional part of your brain -- the one that makes the "gut instinct" kind of decisions -- can keep track in some way so the people in this section way more often picked the car that had the largest number of better variables.

Picking a car, however, is way different from trying to form a word. Our emotional brain can make good decisions, but it can't pick words out of letters. I think that is why I stumble in that game when I have more good choices.

Now, why am I writing about this game?

Because it's interesting, to be sure, but also because of something I've been experiencing this week.

In my spare time I'm writing for Examiner.com. I started with one topic: New Technology. Then I wrote so many articles in that section about Google Wave, that with the help and encouragement of an old friend over at Examiner.com, I ended up starting a whole section devoted to Google Wave News.

Writing about Google Wave I have been unusually prolific, especially since I do most of my writing before breakfast.

But about "New Technology" my production has slipped. A lot.

I think it's because it's like the ball thing. With Wave there is plenty to write about, but really the choices are somewhat limited for a newfangled kind of a communication tool that's been used by, maybe, 0.000001 percent of the world's population.

"New Technology" just has so many possibilities, it's nearly impossible to choose with a rational brain. So, I'll do my best, but the best decisions may be the emotional ones and not the rational ones.

Douthat's Ignoble Nobel Blunder

I try not to comment about the New York Times, but for some reason I tripped across this story from Ross Douthat with the unfortunate headline: Heckuva Job, Barack. The first thing any conservative needs to know is that comparing President Obama to the guy who so badly mishandled hurricane recovery in New Orleans is only going to set your argument back.

Maybe some liberal copy editor slipped that headline past him.

Douthat based a his whole column on the notion that President Obama should have somehow managed to reject the Nobel.

Now I understand that the president is very powerful, but if he could swing largely symbolic European things his way he would have convinced the IOC to bring the Olympics to Chicago.

The Nobel is even less substantial, and I'm sure there's no way that he could have talked his way out of it.

One of my favorite books is from Richard Feynman, the physicist who's work spanned from Einstein to the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. 

IN that book, he wrote that he wished he could have gotten out of accepting the Nobel, but learned there was no way to do it.

(He wrote about that here, but the preview is missing the page that talks specifically about how he wanted to reject the prize. He discussed the idea of that with a reporter, and that reporter explained to him (in a phone call just after he learned he got the prize at 3:30 a.m.) that it would be a bigger deal to reject it than to get it. So he accepted the prize and spent much of the rest of his life making elaborate plans so that nobody would ever know that a Nobel-winner was going to be making a speech about physics.)

The Nobel prize has made it harder for the president to get his agenda done in the US, and anyone who knows 10 cents worth of domestic politics would have predicted that. The Nobel committee may be great at picking out really good books that I won't be reading, but they only have about a nickel's worth of sense about politics in the US.

Greatest Day of Sco.tt's Life!

I'm spending much of the day at the DemoGala event in downtown Denver. I'll be reporting on it for the Examiner soon enough, but I first have to say that this is the greatest day in the life of Sco.tt.

No, not my life, my domain's life. 

You see, I have a card with the domain on it, and that's it. The picture you see above is the whole image on the card. Kind of a minimalist thing that I thought was kind of cool. Turns out that for most people... not so much. They just look at it, and then look at me. Some people are genuinely annoyed.

But not the people at this all-technical event today. They all love it.

The best reaction so far came from the incomparable Adeo Ressi. He's the guy behind two of the great ideas of the last few years: TheFunded and the Founder Institute. He and I have communicated about another potential project a few times, but today was the first time we'd met in person. When he had to go off to speak, he asked for my card. I handed it to him and he said it was the greatest card he'd ever seen. "This makes it worth the trip to Denver!"

Then he went to speak and I went off to a different session hosted by Examiner COO Dave Schafer. Why? Because I said I would, and because Schafer and I long ago toiled side-by-side at an actual newspaper printed on real paper. It was actually an excellent panel with Matt Cohen of OneSpot, Boulder and BDNT's own Robert Reich from OneRiot and the very impressive Lisa Stone of BlogHer. (I'm a sucker for journalists turned entrepreneurs.)

Anyway, one of my spies (I have them everywhere!) told me that Adeo held up my card during his speech, and said it was great, and then he called me a jack-ass because I didn't come to his speech.

To be called a jack-ass by Ressi. Man, if that's not awesome I don't know what is.

Second Saturday Science is on the air

I'm very excited to announce that an idea I've been thinking about forever, and got a little traction when Mark Cuban got a little bit interested in it back in February, has finally turned into something that is happening.

If you have kids ages 6-12 and live in Denver, I hope you'll stop by this Saturday.

All the details are on the new site: Second Saturday Science.

Check it out, and I hope we'll see you there!

Google Wave Scams, Why can't we all just get along?

There's a lot of interest in something, so there the scammers go. Can't they just stick to photos of pop stars?

Anyway, here's a complete guide to the Google Wave scams.

As so often happens, there's a quote from Casablanca that's perfectly apropos.

"This place is full of vultures. Vultures everywhere."

(That link may not work for everyone just yet, it's from a startup called AnyClip that I'm trying. It's pretty great.)

Drudge Goes Down an Ugly Path

OK, I've gone on and on about Drudge, but it needs to be said: The guy has turned almost pathologically against President Obama.

Nobody anywhere was connecting that Chicago crime -- which by big-city standards was really only notable because of the nearby cameras, to the effort to bring the Olympics to Chicago.

Nobody but Drudge.

Now, Drudge has been out in front on stories before, and then quickly gets followed by lots of other media outlets. The guy had a nose for big stories.

But now he's just getting mean, connecting dots that just aren't there.

Maybe he knows, as some smart guys do, that getting the Olympics in Obama's adopted home town could be huge for the Democratic party. And if he does know that, maybe he wants to prevent that from happening.

I had a hunch that Drudge was losing it earlier in the summer. Check out this screen grab:

Somehow he's trying to make the case that you can't possibly grow lettuce in three months. That's the kind of thinking that comes from someone who used to be the night manager of a convenience store.

But I still read Drudge, and I still keep the DrudgeWidget on my blog. What Drudge needs to hear, however, is that he's in danger of becoming the worst thing of all in the web world: Boring.

Google is going to catch up, don't worry

Now that I'm writing about technology over on Examiner.com, I probably won't be writing about it as much over here.

It just has bothered me how some journalists have been counting Google out of the realtime fight.

Today I posted a Guide to the Google Wave Hype.

In short, it's not hype. I think this is the real deal.

The New New New Technology Examiner, Peaches and Crowdsourcing. Confused Yet?

Sometimes I just can't help myself...

This morning I'm cruising through my blogs, and I read a great post by Nate Silver about some very fishy survey results about Oklahoma students.

I've been meaning to write in this space about how I'm now the new "new technology" Examiner over on Examiner.com, but I haven't.

So, do I compose a nice post here, introducing my work over there? No, I gotta go mixing things up and helping Nate solve the problem of not having enough data to show that the survey results are bogus. How? Using crowdsourcing, something I've been reading a lot about lately.

Totally confused? Yes, sorry, I understand. I'd sit down and write a post explaining it all, but I really want to get to the Farmer's Market before they run out of peaches. I'll have much more in the coming days, but at least now you have some explanation of why I wrote on Examiner.com this morning that we could use Crowdsourcing to prove that Oklahomans are not that dumb.

Gibbs Needs to Grow Up

Robert Gibbs is the first male presidential spokesman who is younger than me, so naturally I resent the hell out of him. (For some reason the lack of years of George W. Bush's Dana Perino never bothered me, maybe because she's a Colorado native.)

I've finally figured out why Gibbs rubs me the wrong way: He doesn't know when to shut up. Watch this to see what I mean...

You see that? Secretary Sebelius made a funny, appropriate joke. Gibbs should have just shut up, but instead he drains the humor out of the joke by explaining it, and making the whole matter seem snide and patronizing.

Typical mistake by young punks like Gibbs. He's got "spokesman" in his title, but sometimes the best thing to do is just shut up. President Obama would be better served if Gibbs talked half as much.

The "You Lie!" Guy is also a wimp who sends his wife to do his dirty work.

This video is very good, and she does a very good job, but if his wife is so much better than him, well, then why aren't the good people of South Carolina sending her to congress instead of him?

Just asking.

No, Scott Baio is not a Gen Xer

I disagree completely with this guy's assertion that the Original Gen Xers actually started being born in 1954.

Poppycock.

If he had started in 1961, the year that Barack Obama, Douglas Rushkoff, Chris Anderson and Douglas Coupland were born, then he might have had a case. I mean Coupland literally wrote the book on Generation X.

But in the same year were born 

• Julia Louis-Dreyfus -- famous only because of the completely boomer-centric Seinfeld 
• George Stephanopoulos -- famous because of one of the first Boomer president, the appropriately narcissistic Bill Clinton
• Meg Ryan
• Randy Jackson and 
• child stars Scott Baio and Ralph Macchio. 

That is not a group of Xers by any stretch.

Thanks, but No Thanks

Well, the results were quite clear: Nobody wants a tool to keep track of job prospects.

Yesterday I launched a survey to try to gauge the interest in a new tool that would help job seekers keep track of all the jobs they are applying for.

I wanted to keep the survey small, so I only posted it to my Facebook friends and here, asking that if someone was working, to just send it on to friends who may be looking for work.

Nobody did.

Either I have really rotten friends, or something else is going on. I think now I understand it.

What friend would send an unemployed friend this tracking tool? I mean, what would you say?

Hey friend! 

I just found this great new tool for people who are out of work, and may be for months and months to come! People just like you!!!

Isn't it great that I thought about you when I thought about this crappy economy and how super duper hard it will be for you to find a job!!

Well, see you later.

Your friend.

I don't know why I didn't think that through before.

I was a bit bummed about this, thinking about how quickly dashed was my idea to create a great tool that would be widely used and much appreciated. My wife, always the clever one, took this as great news.

Better to find out after a few hours of work that the idea won't fly. Imagine if you'd spent a few months working on it, she said.

She's right, of course, so on to the next thing.

Are Job Opportunities Falling Through the Cracks?

I haven't written much about this, but I'm looking for a job. Somehow it seems difficult to say that in public because of the general shame that goes along with that, even in this crazy global economic head cold that we are all suffering.

There are job opportunities that pop up, and I diligently apply for them. The ones I really want I make a point of following up on.

But lots of others just seem to fade away.

Also, not all jobs are created equal. Sometimes a job isn't a job, it's just a chance of possibly doing some consulting. I want to keep track of that, too, but there's no "job" for me to track.

I've been trying lots of different systems to keep it all straight, but none of them is ideal. There are plenty of to-do list tools, contact-management tools and online or offline spreadsheets. There are also tools associated with the big job boards, but there is lot's of spammy stuff associated with those. There is also a handful of tools built for job seekers, but they charge too much, have way too much junk associated with them, or just don't really do it for me for some reason or another.

So, am I all alone here? Am I the only one who sees this as a huge need? Especially these days?

Let me know. I've built a very quick and easy one-page survey.

Click here to take the survey.

If you are not actively looking for a job, pass this on to someone who is. You can take the survey if you want, but it's really designed for those who are actively looking.

I'll report back here with the results, and with whatever plans I make based on those results.

Thanks!

We are all the press now

So it appears that Gannett and the AP are having trouble with some of the restrictions of the press passes issued by the SEC to cover college football games.

This fight seems almost quaint.

On one side you have the SEC, which is saying that to get a press credential you have to agree not to blog about the game. On the other side you have the press, including the AP -- which has shown nothing but animus toward bloggers -- declaring that it has the right to blog whatever it wants to.

So, let's say that the SEC doesn't back down and the AP is forced to cover the game by buying a ticket or watching on TV. What would that look like?

Well... it would look like what the world looks like. Zillions of fans will be going to games or watching them, and blogging about what they are doing in real time. They don't need no stinking credentials.

The whole idea of the press credential already seems retro.

We are all the press now.

Irony Alert: Bezos Apologizes for Big Brother-like Removal of 1984

The word "irony" is so often misused that it's almost refreshing when it is used properly.

Sure enough, the opportunity presents itself beautifully when Amazon removed the book 1984 from Kindles through a secret back door that most people didn't know existed. They thought that when you bought a book, well, that you owned it, just like with a book printed on paper. Not so.

So the moment comes, but unfortunately the US press didn't jump on the chance to call the situation ironic. Maybe they never read the book?

The British press, as we might expect, was all over the irony angle.

God save the Queen.

Unemployment is Helping Apple?

There's been a ton of analysis of why it is Apple is doing so well in the middle of the rotten economy, but there's one bit I haven't seen anywhere: Unemployment is helping Apple. A lot.

Here's why:

Just among close friends, I know a couple people who have been laid off. When they go, they have to turn in their corporate-mandated Blackberry. 

They have gotten used to having a smartphone, however, so they use a bit of their severance and go shopping for a new phone. They head to an Apple store. They may know full well that AT&T is a Big, Steaming Heap of Failure, but they also realize that if they are going to be unemployed, or turn into consultants, or whatever, that at least they don't want to hate their phone.

So, they get a phone that makes them smile. There's only one phone that does that.

I don't think that accounts for all of the 5.2 million iPhones Apple sold in the quarter, but I bet it was a lot of them.

When is it OK to Lie?

Never. It's never OK to tell a lie.

But I do think I've found one situation where it would be awfully tempting.

Gawker has the inside scoop on how members of the White House Press Corps were all totally willing to give up on what they do -- reporting -- just to get a ticket to watch fireworks at the White House.

Here is what the email from the White House to about 30 of the White House press corps read:

"You are being invited to attend this event as a guest. Blogging, Twittering or otherwise reporting on this event is not permitted. If you feel that you cannot agree to abide by these ground rules, please don't claim a ticket."

Every single one of them agreed to this rule.

Now here's the thing: I have immense respect for President Obama, and for his desire to keep his family out of the media spotlight. If I was invited, I would certainly not report that Malia spilled mustard on her shirt, or whatever.

But I absolutely would report about the other reporters there, what the general talk was, etc. I would just spill it all as if I was anywhere else in my life. Everybody else is reporting on everything else, how is this somehow different?

Why not lie, take the ticket, then report away?

I'm reminded of two analogous situations. 

First, of course, is Sharon Stone, saying, "What are you going to do? Arrest me for smoking?"

Second is Mike Arrington, who runs TechCrunch, announcing that he will agree to all embargoes (when PR companies give you the news early but insist you don't run with it until an agreed-on time) but then he will break that agreement and run the news whenever he damn well feels like it.

Now I realize that by taking the ticket and the reporting on the fireworks party I would be urinating in the punch bowl, and then the press office might decide not to invite any media to the private affairs. Well, that's OK with me, too. If the Obamas want private family time, they can do it without 30 reporters hanging around. If they want to make the reporters feel special, they are just going to have to find some other way to do it.

The world is changing, and those 30 people just aren't as special as they used to be. The White House Press Office needs to figure that out.

Don't Name That Trend... Be The Trend!

I've seen three different "Blegs" from people casting about for a new name for three different big picture phenomena.

(As they taught me in my magazine writing class back in the day, three makes a trend!)

One is looking for a name for the movement toward more technology and openness in government. This is a topic I'm endlessly fascinated with, but I don't think it will ever have a name because this is just the march of history.

A second is looking for a name for the flow of status updates that come in through Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. This one may get a name, but I'm not sure what it will be. All the ones suggested, even by me, pretty much stink. 

I think this is becoming a real issue. People are really grappling with how to deal with this stream. It took a long time for people to deal with e-mail, and now people just don't know how to deal with a flow of blogs, status updates, tweets and all of it.

It helps me to think of that stream as my "published lifestream." My private stream is, of course, email and phone calls, but my published stream is the collection of published status reports that I want to read, and then there is the stream of what I publish both here on this blog, on my twitter account and my Facebook page.

In my mind the solution uses RSS, which right now works just the way I want it to work for blogs, but doesn't work for the others and even though the difference between a Facebook status update and a blog entry is one that is very difficult to explain because they are essentially the same thing at heart.

There are no good solutions for ways to deal with that stream. Even turning tweets into an RSS feed just doesn't work yet. There's much more to say on this, but I'll save it so I don't get too far off topic.

The third (and therefore trend-making) trend looking for a name is the hunt for a name for the Denver-Boulder high-tech scene. This one absolutely positively will fail, and here's why: The Silicon Valley needed a name because it didn't really have any name before. It was, and is, really, the suburbs of Oakland, which is the original place where there was no there there. The Silicon Valley is the outskirts of the place with nothing there. 

There's absolutely nothing interesting about the Silicon Valley outside of the fact that a whole bunch of revolutionary high-tech companies have done very well there. It's amazing for that one aspect, and completely free of any other attributes that make for an interesting society.

Denver is an actual place. There IS a there there. Same goes for Boulder. Coming up with a name for one aspect of a place that is interesting on it's own won't work because people are already familiar with Denver and Colorado, and do not need a new moniker to help understand it. 

And, by the way, having a name for one aspect of the economy here also won't do anything to make it super-dooper-fabulous, as I have a hunch some of the boosters are hoping.

All three attempts at naming, however, I think come from something of a Baby Boomer mindset. It's important for people who were part of "The Summer of Love" or "Watergate" or "Getting Fat and Lazy and Moving to the Suburbs" to name things to show to the world how different they are, how much they really are "Changing the World, Man."

As Jeff Gordinier points out in his excellent: X Saves the World, it's Boomers that really want to label how they are changing the world. It's the Gen-X crowd that first of all eschews the Gen-X label, and then eschews any other labels before going out and actually changing the world.

I don't know if you noticed, but the people behind the aforementioned revolutionary changes in governing and in publishing of status details are not the ones trying to put a name on it. They are too busy doing what they do.

Good for them! Long live the Name-Free Trend!

Fourth of July Duds

OK, I know this is sacrilege, but I just don't get why fireworks are so popular.

When I see that the economy forced the cancellation of a bunch of shows, well, I have trouble getting upset about it.

It's not that I don't like fireworks, it's just that I can't see why everyone else does like them.

I mean, they are kind of cool from the perspective of fire and explosions and pretty colors, etc. And nobody has more love for our country than me of the history of the Declaration of Independence, the patriots at Fort McHenry, and all of the others before that and since.

But after that... meh.

I mean, even the most boring baseball game still has its unknowns, its surprise endings, its character development.

Fireworks have no narrative arc, no plot twists, nothing.

Last evening we went to the fireworks Rockies game, and got discounted tickets because they had an obstructed view of the fireworks. During the singing of the National Anthem, the crews cleverly shot off one firework that exploded just as we all sung "Bombs bursting in air."

That was perfect. I enjoyed the fireworks as a form of punctuation.

So when my son said he wanted to go home after we sang the song about the peanuts and cracker jacks, I said, "You bet, I think we've seen enough fireworks already this evening."

Maybe even Jefferson had a bit too much time on his hands?

I'm a big fan of Jefferson, I enjoy reading the Declaration of Independence every year. It's hard to imagine writing anything that could have such an influence on the world, and still be so easy to read and enjoyable.

But after the US was independent, and after Jefferson became president, I get the feeling that if he had solitaire on his computer, he might have been playing that some.

He didn't, so instead he invented ciphers, one of which didn't get cracked until this week. Amazing.

Be Nice To Reporters

I always try to be helpful to reporters. I used to be one, so there's that. There's also the whole dying-industry thing, which I did NOT bring up when they called.

But I felt a bit useless today with them on the phone. They called to get my reaction to Amendment 50 in Colorado, which passed last November.

I was a leader of the opposition, such as it was. Truth be told it was one other guy and me. We created a blog, and sort of assembled a rag-tag coalition of people that never met but came out against it. The "coalition" was the strangest of bedfellows, as the Boulder County Democrats came out against it, as did Focus on the Family. Nearly a million people voted no, but a bit more than a million voted yes.

So the election was last November, and tomorrow the changes kick into place. I think the reporters were hoping that I'd be organizing some kind of mass sit-in, maybe chaining myself to a slot machine or something.

Truth is I'd mostly forgotten about it. I'm not a big anti-gambling activist. I just thought Amendment 50 went too far, and that it would create little Las Vegas zones in those three mountain towns. I was also worried about the sociological problems associated with the Indian Casinos near Durango, where I lived and worked as a reporter, often detailing very sad stories from the reservations there, the Ute Mountain Utes and the Souther Utes.

But elections have consequences. The Nevada gambling corporations wanted to change the Colorado Constitution, so they spent $7 million to tailor it to their liking. They got what they wanted. I don't like it, but the election is over so now I'll just continue to avoid those towns.

And if any more reporters call, I'll try to come up with some better quotes.

Drudge, Hypochondria, and the President

I'm convinced that Drudge is a total hypochondriac. He's got about 20 stories about the swine flu up right now.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but he is leaning a bit too far in the panic direction.

On the other side is TechCrunch, which has a story up, saying that "panic" is being spread over the web. 

I disagree. I think these types of flu are a bit scary, and with the federal government now working on it, it's a legitimate news story.

(I bet we find, eventually, that like the last big scare of the bird flu, that this is not just some random thing, that there is a big-picture story that caused this. It turns out the avian flu was caused by chicken farmers in China giving Tamiflu and other antivirals to their chickens. It didn't work, surprise surprise, but what did happen is that they helped create a flu bug that did not get better when you took Tamiflu. This is something I learned about from a doctor because it hurt me directly: I got the flu and couldn't take Tamiflu to get better.)

The thing that worries, me, however, is that Drudge has such animus toward Obama.

I don't know if there's anything to the story that Obama met and shook hands with a man in Mexico City who died the next day from the swine flu, but I do know that if it happened to President Bush that Drudge would have had that story front and center.

Denver's Altitude claims another

Harry Kalas died today, the day after leaving the Mile High City.

For those of you who don't know him, you probably know his voice. He was the announcer for the Phillies forever, and was also the voice behind those great NFL films, the ones that looked so great because they were shot on real film instead of video. They always seemed to show two rows of huge men with steam coming out of their snouts on some frozen turf. The voice just boomed out. I have a few of the choice ones on my iPhone that always make me smile when they come up in the random cue.

I got to meet Kalas, when Denver hosted the All Star game. I went with a pal to the Wynkoop back when Hickenlooper was still just a barkeep, before he went into politics.

Kalas was there on the patio with Hickenlooper, one of the world's biggest Phillies fans, and Hick was just soaking up every moment with this small, chain-smoking man. I didn't know who it was because when he was speaking in the group he just sounded like a regular guy. He was very slight, and was wearing a polyester suit. I figured maybe he was an uncle of Hickenlooper or something, the way he looked at Kalas with such reverence. Then I figured it couldn't be a relative because Hickenlooper must have been a foot or more taller than Kalas.

So I whispered to my buddy, trying to figure out who it was, and then learned it was Harry the K, the original "Outa Here!" guy. He had some amazing stories, very fun to listen to, but he was not at all boastful about any of it, he was just a very polite guy telling funny stories and then trying to deflect as much attention away from himself as he could.

And smoking non stop. 

I wonder how much of his amazingly deep and powerful voice for such a small guy was actually just created by the damage of all that smoke.

Poor guy. Threw out the first pitch a week ago. Flies up to Denver because he's not the kind of guy who takes days off during the baseball season. Has some trouble breathing here but doesn't make a fuss. Goes with the team to the next stop and dies while writing out the lineup for that day's game. 

This very well done story of his death doesn't specifically blame Denver, but it's hard not to make a connection when we've seen it so many times before here. You just need all the lung capacity you can get here.

You will be missed, Harry.

Don Baylor is da man

Look, I just want to be the first to say it. Don Baylor is the man.

Pitching will always be an issue in Denver, but I'm convinced that the reason the ball hasn't been "popping" off the bat the way it did when Baylor was the manager has less to do with the "humidor" than it does with the fact that Don Baylor wasn't around.

Now that he's back, hitters are listening to him and the ball is leaving the yard a lot.

Yes, yes, we are only three games into the season, but the Rockies have not yet played in Denver, and already they are second in the league in hitting and second in homers.

Tulo is on pace to hit 120 home runs this season! Helton hasn't hit one yet, but you know spigot will open up soon enough.

So you read it here first: If the Rockies do well this season, Don Baylor deserves a LOT of the credit, and by the way it will be a lot of fun to watch and listen this year.