Brian Alvey

When I was in high school I drank Coca Cola like a fiend. When I was in college I was thrilled when three-liter bottles came out. After college I hit my largest weight ever, 225 pounds. Not good.

Around the time I met Niki, I was drinking up to two two-liter bottles a day. I knew all the caffeine and sugar were bad for me, but I was hooked. I knew I couldn’t quit the caffeine, but I decided to ditch the sugar by switching to Diet Coke. The only trouble was that I didn’t like the taste.

I was consulting at Business Week and they had Diet Cherry Coke in the soda machines, so I drank those and over time alternated in some Diet Cokes until I was used to the diet taste. Sipping a regular Coke was no longer an option. It was too sweet. My plan worked, sort of. Over two or three years I lost 63 pounds, down to 162. Just from switching to diet soda and hitting a rowing machine twice a week.

My new problem was that I was drinking up to two two-liter bottles of Diet Coke a day.

I tried limiting my Diet Cokes to one can in the morning and one in the afternoon, but that wasn’t easy. If I was stressed in the afternoon, one can would get immediately followed by a second. I tried little games like having a tall cup of water in between sodas, but I would just chug the water so I could start that next soda.

I knew it was all or nothing. I couldn’t moderate it.

Last March 16, I had my last Diet Coke, my last soda ever. Surprisingly, there were still more cans in the garage. I just stopped. I did the same thing I did with chocolate when I was a pudgy kid. I convinced myself that Diet Coke was toxic, that I didn’t like the taste, that it was taking years off of my life, that it causes cancer.

And it worked.

I still drink iced tea. I still get some caffeine almost every day, but nowhere near as much as I used to get wired on — and it’s the weakest iced tea you’ll ever see someone drink, mostly water.

I had a sip of Diet Coke at a birthday party last September where there was no water or tea available and it was the nastiest thing. I poured the rest of the cup out.

I didn’t even properly commemorate the one year anniversary when it happened.

Screw soda. I won.

I met an old friend of mine at an event he was attending and another old friend walked up and introduced me to the guy he was talking to, Jack Myers. I don’t know if I gave Jack my business card or if he just has the mutant ability to sense peoples’ email addresses, but I suddenly ended up on his newsletter mailing list. Not a weekly newsletter — we’re talking three or four of these a day.

The annoying thing is that they’re about industries I follow and they’re often useful. So I haven’t unsubscribed. And I keep reading them. Damn.

Today’s morning edition had an article by Shelly Palmer covering Antigua’s recent copyright threats:

This week the government of Antigua threatened to unleash hell on the information economy. Well, kind of … they’re threatening to repeal intellectual property treaties with the United States and to allow massive copyright infringement on the island if the U.S. doesn’t hasten its response to pending trade disputes. In short, they are threatening to copy “virtually anything that can duplicated.”

The reason for the threat of InfoWar, according to a representative of the Island, is that the United States is not negotiating fairly in a dispute over Internet gambling. Apparently, we owe Antigua $21 million dollars and they really want the money. If they don’t get it, they will tighten-up our debt by stealing music, movies and other intellectual property.

Right off the bat, you have to give kudos to Shelly on labeling this “Pirates in the Caribbean.” Shelly points out that anything that can be copied is already available and this might not be such a strong threat, but it would have some interesting effects on the value chain.

This is already happening in music. People are spending less on CDs, so artists and labels and focusing on other ways to make money like concerts and merchandise that isn’t so easily ripped off digitally. In software we have open source. Piracy is a waste of time when the software is available for free and the money is all being made through services and support.

As someone who publishes DRM-free comic books online, the evolution of the role of the publisher in a time of easy piracy is fascinating.

I haven’t blogged in more than six weeks, mainly because there wasn’t a lot of news I wanted to share publicly. Plus, it’s just easier to give a half dozen updates over Twitter every day. Twitter has ruined blogging.

We have a baby daughter arriving any day now. Niki’s mom died a week ago on a cruise ship halfway around the world. Niki can’t travel to Florida for her mom’s funeral this week, so that is a mess.

I had a great trip to the west coast a few weeks back, meeting with investors who wanted to hear about Crowd Fusion. That was exciting and reaffirming. We have a solid model and a great, growing team and I just want it all to get built and launched yesterday. My four favorite questions from the trip were:

• How is this different from Typepad or WordPress?
• How is this different from Glam or Sugar?
• How is this different from Mahalo?
• Can I get you some sparkling water?

I skipped SxSW because I wouldn’t have been able to get back for our daughter’s birth if Niki had gone into labor. She didn’t arrive, but thanks to her I was able to miss the SxSW flu everyone else caught, a.k.a., SxSARS.

So this week I’m trying to tie up loose ends, get freelancers loaded up with work and squeeze in some meetings like the really productive ones I had in NYC yesterday. As an unexpected bonus I went to a True Ventures party for Automattic (WordPress), Sphere and Giga Omni Media — plus some lesser known media brands like Hearst and The New York Times.

I didn’t get to see Matt Mullenweg on my SF trip or at SxSW, but we did get to catch up last night. That’s always good. I spent some time with Jason Calacanis, Om Malik, Alan Patricof, John Brockman, Toni Schneider, Scott Kurnit, MC Hammer, paidContent’s Staci Kramer, TechCrunch’s Heather Harde, Rcrd Lbl’s Peter Rojas and Inhabitat’s Jill Fehrenbacher. Like I said, it was an unexpected bonus.

So, am I done being quiet? I hope so.

I love web comics. I have a comic book publishing company that’s giving away comics online for free and I follow several strips both on their sites and in my feed reader. Some creators post their whole comic in their feeds and some just send out links letting you know a new strip is online. One of the ones that puts each daily comic in a feed is Savage Chickens, by Doug Savage. Hmm…chickens and feeds…a perfect combination!

Unlike the geek humor of xkcd which makes hilarious SQL jokes and Internet in-jokes, Savage Chickens is more accessible. It’s like The Far Side, but starring chickens and drawn on yellow sticky notes. Today’s chicken strip (oh, stop me, this is too easy) appealed to me since I haven’t seen any of the recent movies with surprise endings.

Brilliant.

Niki is a big Nathan Lane fan so for Christmas I got us tickets to the matinee performance of November on Saturday, plus the all-important baby-sitter.

November is a new play by David Mamet about a first-term U.S. president who is guaranteed to lose his upcoming re-election bid. He has messed up the country pretty badly and is being advised to just take his remaining campaign money and go away quietly. Mamet also wrote Glengarry Glen Ross and Wag The Dog, among many other things.

We saw Nathan Lane three times in The Producers, once in the revival of The Odd Couple and once in Butley. He is always amazing and Niki and I are really big fans of his.

So this was planned as a Christmas present for Niki, but we got a surprise bonus present for Jack.

Although Laurie Metcalf (a.k.a., Roseanne’s sister) is listed after Nathan Lane in the billing, Dylan Baker spends more time on the stage as the President’s advisor. Baker played Dr. Curtis Connors in the Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3movies and is rumored to be signed for one more film so he can become The Lizard in Spider-Man 4.

The present for Jack was a picture of his Daddy with Dr. Connors:

Marc Orchant was a long-time Weblogs, Inc. Network (WIN) blogger. He was the first blogger I got email from when our servers were hacked during my anniversary trip in July 2005. Sadly, he’s not the first WIN blogger I knew who has died.

At our WINstock dinner two short years ago, Marc didn’t have a problem with my dev team pirating his company’s ssh client, SecureCRT. He even offered to get them legitimate copies and thanked my guys for spreading the word about the product.

He suffered a massive heart attack a week ago and died earlier today. According to the last couple of posts he wrote about quitting Facebook, he was only 50.

He left WIN for ZDNet in early 2006, sending us a message titled “So long and thanks for all the fish…er, fun.” I congratulated him on the move and he had nothing but positive things to say about his experience with us.

The fact that everyone, without exclusion, at WIN was completely supportive and understanding made the decision a lot easier to make. And it’s been a very positive move – I’m writing at a length that’s more comfortable for me and working from a platform much more focused on the level of geek/tech I’m passionate about.

I was really excited for him. A few months ago he made a similar jump out of ZDNet and into blognation USA in a post called So long and thanks for all the fish. (Do you see a pattern here?)

He was a talented, professional and prolific writer and we were lucky to have worked with him on our little blogging network as long as we did.

There’s a Wikipedia page with the speech Nixon was prepared to read in the event that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin didn’t make it home from their trip to the moon.

I think about these kinds of contingency plans companies prepare all the time and sometimes you even read a headline that was written expecting an election or sporting event went one way when it really went the other after the story was published. It’s wild to read what we might have been hearing Nixon tell the country if problems had prevented NASA from bringing the two astronauts back to Earth safely:

To: H. R. Haldeman
From: Bill Safire
July 18, 1969.

IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER:
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

PRIOR TO THE PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT:
The President should telephone each of the widows-to-be.

AFTER THE PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT, AT THE POINT WHEN NASA ENDS COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE MEN:
A clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to “the deepest of the deep,” concluding with the Lord’s Prayer.

Chilling!

When I was outed on Twitter, I did a recap of some of my favorite tweets like Matt Heerema and Jeffrey Zeldman do.

Here is another list of some select Twitter statuses, in the very un-blog-like oldest-to-newest order:

• “Would you like me to leave some of this here, as a warning to the new bottles?” http://tinyurl.com/2lj4jt Sep 13
• Just sang Mr. Roboto 50 times. My throat is killing me. Sucrets? Sucrets? You got a Sucrets? Sep 14
• I have a layover in Dulles right now. Why do I feel an overwhelming urge to get on a conference call? Sep 19
• A Pirate Physicist asks: How many joule seconds does it take to walk the Planck? Sep 19
• Ever since that spider bit my hand at the science fair today, I’ve beennn feeeling funnnny. Noww myy hanndss arre sticckkinnng to thhe keys. Sep 21
• “Hey beautiful, I’m just talking to my kids, the back door’s open” replaces “Don’t tase me bro!” as quote du jour. http://tinyurl.com/24bbdl Sep 25
• When Daddy X-acto knifes Captain America’s mighty shield, all those who chose to oppose his knife must yield… Sep 29
• Just hit 300 contacts on LinkedIn. It’s either time to switch to Facebook and start over or blog declaring LinkedIn bankruptcy. I’m torn. Sep 30
• If The Office was 5 minutes long and had nudity, I would watch it every week: http://tinyurl.com/ynrsd5 Oct 01
• @gwenstefani I know you’re secretly following me on Twitter. Happy 38th birthday, Gwen. Go b-a-n-a-n-a-s! Oct 04
• Did anyone *not* expect the Isiah Thomas and MSG verdict? When will you all realize: the Knicks never win. Oct 04
• Not a big fan of Mr. Choketober right now. Some offense from our regular season MVP could have meant a win. That and no plague of insects… Oct 06
• Watching kids’ TV right now. That Benny is a Dora bull! Oct 06
• Rushing a wedding like Pam and Rick’s, it’s tough to remember all the details. Like finding a videographer for the wedding night. Congrats! Oct 07
• Just saw the official medical reason why Roger Clemens was pulled from the game last night: he has a 45-year-old left hamstring. Oct 08
• How lame are you to send me marketing spam addressed to “Brian No longer with company”? I’m no longer at the company! Get it? Oct 09
• Early morning rehearsals with my new band: The Wide Stances. Our slogan: We get your toes tapping! Oct 10
• Got my first AOL layoff-related IM, “I can FedEx it to you with this empty box I just got from AOL.” Was kidding. Grim day turning grimmer. Oct 16
• Just found out that the Detroit Marathon is 26.2 miles long. That’s strange. I could have sworn it was an 8-mile race. Oct 21
• Buzz Lightyear has midlife crisis, buys sports cars and chases women. TMZ’s photo caption: “Two Infinitis…and a blonde!” Oct 22
• @gavin In light of recent news your rapper name “David Cop-A-Feel” isn’t so cute anymore. Definitely go back to using “Sir Milks-A-Lot”. Oct 23

I need to do these recaps more often. It’s therapeutic.

Ten years ago today Niki and I got engaged in Mystic, CT.

I often think about how different we were back then from how we are now and I’m stunned at how lucky I was that we found each other — even more so that we decided to spend our lives together. I thought we were pretty close back then, but I had no clue how much closer we could actually get.

Yesterday, without thinking about the consequences, I Twittered the following: “In Tampa for my big job interview. Just saw Girardi in the airport parking lot. Small world.” I like letting people know what’s going on with me, but sometimes I should think before I tweet.

Yes, it’s true. I have been interviewing with the Yankees to be their manager next season. I am one of their top four candidates and we’re already talking salary, number of years and what I’ll be doing with my comic book publishing company and my new content management system while I focus on getting our team back to the World Series.

In case you hadn’t heard, I reported here first the news that Joe Torre had turned down his contract offer.

Blogs are all about transparency, so to give you an inside look at the process here is a message I sent to George Steinbrenner’s sons this morning:

Dear Hal and Hank,

I wanted to thank you again for the opportunity to interview with you yesterday. I’ve been giving your final question about the other candidates a lot of thought.

Here are my opinions on my managerial competition:

Tony Peña was a great catcher and we all know that catchers understand the game and how to manage it on average way better than any other position player, but he is too valuable to lose as first base coach.

Joe Girardi is a good kid. Another great catcher — the one who caught David Cone’s perfect game in ’99 — but management-wise I think he’s lacking. Sure he was National League Manager Of The Year two seasons ago, but that’s the National League. What if he puts a pitcher in the batting lineup by mistake? Plus, he’s a pretty good broadcaster on your own YES network. I think he deserves more time on camera.

And what can I say about Don Mattingly? First, he’s not a former catcher so managing doesn’t come naturally to him. Second, how can you trust a guy who is famous for stealing food from little kids? Sure, he was screwed out of the ’86 MVP award. (Who gives a pitcher both the Cy Young and the MVP award?) Of course it’s bogus, but is it really your responsibility to heal his old wounds by giving him Joe’s old job?

Anyway, I hope those were the kinds of assessments you were looking for. I’ve got a million more and I can’t wait to get started working with your organization.

Thank you again for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Brian Alvey

So there you have it. I could have gone the other way and focused on my competition’s positives, but why help them choose someone else for my job?

By the way, Hank and Hal used the word “bogus” like fifty times during my interview, so I used it in my note to them as a subconscious bonding tool. It’s a subtle thing, but as you can see I do subtle really well.