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.
After not thinking about LOGO for years and years, it appeared to me twice this week.
The first time was when we were taking a tour of a school my older son might go to next year. They had computer generated drawings in the hallway and someone pointed out that they were teaching LOGO in the computer lab.
The second was in a Wired article this week called Forward 40: What Became of the LOGO Programming Language? The article covered the history of the LOGO programming language and talked about the only thing I remember from using LOGO in fourth grade.
In LOGO you’d type in commands and then a little turtle would carry them out. The turtle was just a triangle and as it moved it would draw out lines with its tail. If you told it this:
FORWARD 50
RIGHT 90
REPEAT 4
then the turtle would draw a square. Of course my favorite was:
RIGHT 1
FORWARD 99999999999
or whatever the highest number was that it would accept. I think you could only tell it to move something like 9999 and then you’d have to follow that with a REPEAT 9999 command. that would cause the turtle to turn slightly and then speed up the screen drawing these overlapping lines across the screen to the right — sort of like messing with the horizontal hold on an old black and white television. It was a trip.
The Wired article invited people to share their own LOGO stories, but I figured I’d put mine here since I hadn’t heard of LOGO since fourth grade and now I’ve heard it come up twice in a week. Wild.
TechCrunch reported that Propeller.com has been doing better than Netscape.com since AOL took the Netscape domain away from the social news team and turned it back into a portal.
The conclusions they found included:
I think they’re missing the story here. The real conclusion a savvy reporter should draw is that the Propeller team needs to be careful to stay under the radar or a middle manager at AOL is going to take their new domain name away. Just look at all the built-in traffic it has!
I’m betting that the social news site will live at either Compuserve.com or Switched.com by Christmas and Propeller.com will be an instant messenger client.
Joey Manley, who knows a lot about publishing web comics, wrote a great article covering the ComicMix Phase Two launch and focused on the quality of our online comic book reader.
Overall he was really kind to us. Being that he’s a guy who has obsessed over the problem of reading comic books online, his positive review means a lot. He said that there was nothing wrong with the interface, but added that there were a few extra things he’d like to see — some missed opportunities.
First, Joey asked for permalinks to individual comic pages. His commenter Bill said “Comments per page are a must for webcomics.” Commenter Gerhard Bahnsen said “permalinks are a total must” and likes it when each page is commentable. Are you sensing a theme here?
Like Joey Manley, I have obsessed over how to read a tall multi-page comic book online for quite a while and I have some reasons for not having permalinks. There is a solution that lets people link straight to a specific page within an issue, but I’m still not sold on having comments for each page. That topic deserves its own blog post and will get one this week.
Second, he asked for full-content RSS feeds. I could see if I was an independent webcomic artist and my primary goal was to tap into the audience that already read webcomics via RSS feeds. I’d put my whole 60K three-panel strip into a feed for free at full size. I wouldn’t care what method people use to read my daily strip as long as they read it. But providing full-content feeds of multiple full-color 1MB comic book pages — not in our current online reader and not as part of our site — isn’t high on our list. We pay our creators competitive industry rates, you know.
We will definitely have RSS feeds to alert people when our new issues get published and feeds for just about everything else on our site soon. Those feeds will include preview images, probably thumbnails, but not our giant 1024×1574 images.
Joey said that there were probably more ways the site could be “bloggified.” I agree! I’ve built blogging platforms before and, although this is not running on a purely blog publishing platform, I will not be leaving many standard blog features out. The only reason they’re not in there now is that this new platform was built from scratch in the last two months. I left my old platform behind at AOL along with a pretty stellar development team. Hey, that’s the subject of another upcoming post.
His commenters pushed for even more:
Gerhard suggested adding a way to save what place you were at in a story that’s longer than a five-page installment. Fantastic! We were working towards something like that, but it was more along the lines of remembering what issues our members had read. We will add that to our list. I already told Christoph he needed to add that “remembers your place” feature for his inline podcast player months ago. Why do I not think to add these things to my own products? 😉
He asked for a few other features that we have coming up in Phase Three, but rule number one of Phase Three is “No one talks about Phase Three.”
Gerhard didn’t like having to search all over the site to find our issues. Great observation. With just one comic to show the world on Tuesday — and only a couple in the first week — we hadn’t yet had some of the listing pages working. You pretty much had to click the promo links at the top of the home page or on the covers on the home page. Navigation options will increase as we add more content and as we, um, add more navigation.
As of Friday morning we have a primitive comic issues listing page that you can get to from the “Comics” tab at the top of every page. It’s not exactly how we’ll be listing our issues in the future, but for now it works like a blog’s home page — listing content with the most recent stuff on top.
I’m loving these discussions about how best to read tall multi-page comic books online. If you’ve got any suggestions, let me know.
You all know that stars like Mark Cuban, Jason Calacanis, Peter Rojas and Harvey Levin use my old blogging platform, but are there any other famous people using Blogsmith?
Sure there are!
Niki had the food channel on yesterday and I asked her if we were watching Bobby Flay. She said it was Tyler Florence. Ah, I remember that name because I saw him in Blogsmith. He blogs at the clever domain AOLFoodBlog.com. I should have known it wasn’t Bobby Flay because the guy didn’t look stoned. I’m sure Bobby Flay is drug-free, but to me he always seems high. Maybe it’s because he’s a guy who’s always cooking and I’m just reading into it.
Today I clicked on an AOL news story and saw a sidebar listing some featured blogs. Weblogs, Inc. ones? Of course not, but I did see a few names I had heard of before. One was Mo Rocca from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. He can be found on AOL’s evocatively named group blog News Bloggers. If you just want to go to Mo, you can find a listing of Mo-only work.
More you say? Sure thing.
Here’s Regina Lewis’ blog. She’s on the DIY Network and all over TV.
And Blogging Stocks recently added Jim Cramer from TheStreet.com and CNBC’s Mad Money.
It’s always wild to see someone on TV who also uses Blogsmith for their blog.
I enjoyed Ryan Block’s response to Nick Denton’s assertion that Gizmodo’s traffic has passed Engadget’s.
The most interesting section was the one where Ryan addressed Denton’s claim that “Engadget had… in AOL, a corporate parent which funneled through new visitors.”
“Oh Nick, how I wish. According to our internal traffic systems, yesterday, our second biggest day for traffic ever, AOL referrers accounted for 0.2% – yes, less than one half percent – of our total page views. On our biggest day ever, the day the iPhone was announced, our AOL referrers accounted for a record 2.1%; in all of August, they represented less than 0.5% of all traffic. The vast majority, I believe, are just coming from AOL search (which uses Google, where we’re routinely higher ranked than our competition), too – not from promo.”
It’s bad corporate strategy for the past of online publishing (portals) to have its hands on the steering wheel while the present of online publishing (blogs) sits in the back seat repeatedly asking, “Are we there yet?”
A better strategy would be to find the future of online publishing.
My wife guessed my Twitter address and followed me. One of my favorite web designers found me from her blog and followed me.
So I came out of the Twitter closet and followed a bunch of people I like.
Does this mean I don’t think Twitter is for teenage girls anymore? No. It is still a great service for teenage girls, but as Jeffrey said it’s also a good “bon mot generator.” It’s also a logged semi-public chat room and the variety of ways to get content in are impressive: IM; text messages from my phone; through their web page; by fax; pigeon; telepathy and more.
Plus I can do “My Favorite Tweets” recaps like Matt does:
Update: No that status message above where the girl is drunk is not about me cheating on my pregnant wife. It’s a line from that big Carrie Underwood song. It just fit my theme that day — wondering why Twitter asks “What are you doing?” when people are going to use it like an instant messaging service. Good grief.
I am a sucker for anything about Frankenstein or mad scientists.
Especially a good comic strip.
Especially a Rhymes With Orange one.
Last night I took my sons to a Yankee game without Niki. The people in front of me thought I was brave.
Our seats were only a few rows away from right field, but the view was blocked by the foul pole and its net. Besides the great game and the win, the highlight for Tor was the Yankee squirrel. He’s a squirrel that showed up a few games ago and got a ton of television time. He sits on the top of that foul pole and every now and then climbs down it and then back up. People cheer. They take pictures and video of him. They yell at people who scare the squirrel back up the pole.
We watched him climb down over and over. One time he turned around to head back up and started shaking and then squirting streams of pee. Tor screamed “Pee! Pee!” It was hilarious.
The squirrel emptied himself one more time a few innings later and that started to freak Tor out. He was sure we were all going to get peed on even though it all rained straight down and we were way out of his range. Even telling Tor what position the squirrel would play for the Yankees didn’t calm him down or cheer him up.
The squirrel would of course be a middle reliever.
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