Brian Alvey

After more than six weeks of me not drinking any Diet Coke, Niki’s cousin is visiting and we have a case of very attractive cans in our kitchen.

I’ll let you know how it goes…

Update: There are like four frosty cold cans of Diet Coke in our refrigerator this morning. None in the basement where I work. So far I’m winning the battle of wills, but it has only been 12 hours since they arrived. I don’t know when her cousin is leaving, but I’m afraid she won’t be able to drink all of them before she goes. I want to give a shout out to Gavin for the positive words of support and to Dave for dropping off those motivational audio tapes.

Before I turned four, I spent a bunch of time at Virginia Tech and have lots of memories of Blacksburg. My mom used to take me for sundaes in nearby Roanoke. I remember a little girl named Tabitha who lived in our neighborhood who had the same birthday as me. I have a pretty vivid memory of me, my grandfather and my dad trading hats at my dad’s graduation.

After Virginia Tech, my dad got his law degree at American University in D.C. When I was seven, we moved to Brooklyn, but long before I was a Yankees fan I was a Virginia Tech Hokie.

A few days after the shootings, my dad emailed me with some facts I didn’t know about his days at Virginia Tech.

In the spring of 1970 when I was born, my dad was living at Ambler Johnston Hall, the same dormitory where the killing began.

When my dad was a freshman, most of his classes were in Norris Hall, the main engineering administration and classroom building — a building which might never be used again.

He told me about an experience he had which made him decide to transfer out of engineering at the end of his freshman year. He went from his professor’s office to the engineering dean’s office in Norris Hall to request his transfer. He expected that he would get an appointment with someone who would try to talk him out of it and instead the woman behind the counter pulled out an IBM punch card with his name on it and asked what department he wanted to transfer to. He thought for a minute and said math.

She filled out some department codes and he walked out in disbelief. It was like they were expecting him to not tough it out. They had lost a top engineering student and didn’t even care.

Later he realized that all freshman engineering students were effectively “undeclared” and all of them had to choose a more specific engineering major at the end of the year: electrical, civil, aero, mechanical or even math.

So two major changes in my dad’s life were connected those two Virginia Tech buildings: Ambler Johnston Hall and Norris Hall.

As he put it, “Got here from there.”

Our Weblogs GM Judith Meskill is leaving. Today we’re having some Weblogs sales meetings in NYC and tonight we’re taking her out for a farewell dinner.

It has been a roller coaster ride recently for me at AOL. Losing Judith is definitely a low. Meetings with the new AOL Platforms boss Ted Cahall and the new “owner” of Weblogs Marty Moe have been the highlights. Even Ron Grant seems like he knows what he’s doing, so I guess you can’t believe everything you read in Valleywag.

Between the three of them, my AOL optimism tank is no longer on empty.

That tank is a long way from being topped off, but at least I am seeing signs that AOL could be turning around.

If you work at AOL and believe that AOL doesn’t need any turning around, I’d like to point you to a hot web 2.0 resume service some friends of mine built. You’ll thank me a couple of months from now. An updated resume is your friend.

Here’s part of a note I sent out to our blogger mailing list last Friday about Judith:

Imagining Weblogs without Jason is easy, but I can hardly imagine Weblogs without Judith.

Judith hasn’t said what she plans to do next, but I wish her the all the best and I can’t wait to see what she does.

Working with her has been a pleasure and we were lucky to have her. She was overqualified for every role Weblogs ever used her in, including the top spot.

That makes this an even bigger loss for AOL than it is for us.

Engadget’s Ryan Block also talks about Judith leaving on his blog.

The Boston Marathon takes place today and one of the official participants will be running the marathon from space, astronaut Suni Williams.

I’m sure it’s a lot of work to run a marathon even when you’re weightless and I am happy to report that they are not counting the space station’s own orbiting into her distance. I can’t wait to see the video of this woman trying to spill a cup of water on herself as she runs — only to have it float upward.

It reminds me of a Seth Meyers Saturday Night Live rant during the 2001 World Series that was being played in November.

He noted that The Yankees were struggling against Arizona because Red Sox fans were taking post-9/11 pity on the Yankees and rooting for them. He complained that “everyone and everything Boston roots for loses. If Boston rooted for gravity, we’d all be floating three inches off the ground.”

And now we’ve got someone running the Boston Marathon in zero gravity.

Wicked.

Some of you have known for a while that I’m on my way out, but to others it’s likely to be a surprise.

Is it because they are prepping the company so they can sell it to Microsoft? No.

Is it because all of the management who paid attention to you and respected your business and your team was fired or has quit? No. If I was leaving over that, I would have done it when it happened at the end of last year.

Is it because AOL is where brands go to die? No. Some brands survive and some people are reporting that AOL is a breeding ground for hot new web 2.0 startup sites like Cindy Li’s Ficlets, which was a huge hit at SxSW among AOLers.

Here’s the deal: In 2003, Jason and I saw the future of publishing in blogs. Now in 2007, I have seen the future of publishing and it is Twitter.

With some funding of my own and some outside funding to be announced later this week, I snagged a hot domain name for it — twittersinc.com. I paid low six figures for the domain, but I think it really gets to the heart of the matter, like we did with Weblogs, Inc. This is professional twitting on a variety of consumer and trade topics. Our tagline will be “This is not your daughter’s Twitter!”

I was torn between that one and “To twitfinity and beyond!” Let me know what you think. I’m trying to be transparent here.

We are launching later on in April with eight twitter publications:

Engatwit: obsessively covering gadgets
Autotwit: what we’re driving, what the guy in front of us is driving
Twitfood: what we’re eating right this minute
Twitter Fanboy: constant updates on the Twitter phenomenon
Joytwit: can we twit and play Xbox at the same time?
Cinematwitical: what movies we’re watching right now
Twitting Baby: all about parenting
That’s Twit: healthy living while twitting

I am so excited about the potential for my next venture that I can barely contain myself!

If you are already twitting about any of these topics and want to do it for money or if you have a Twitter account with more than 500 followers and you’re looking for an acquisition, fill out the short survey form after the jump.

Continue reading Why I am leaving AOL

Jack and I played in the backyard for an hour two days ago. Our backyard was covered in a foot of snow with a layer of hard frozen snow on top. Jack walked across it with no trouble, but most of the time when I took a step my foot went through. Jack played on his swing set and marveled at a pretty large rubber ball that was barely poking through the snow.

After we came back inside, I told him that I had a blast with him. He asked me what that meant. I explained that I had such a good time playing with him that I felt like I was taking off in a rocket ship — blast off. I asked him if he had a blast too and he said no, he didn’t feel like he was a rocket ship taking off. I told him it was just an expression and that I wasn’t really going to take off into the sky. He assured me that he still never once felt like he was a rocket ship.

“You had a blast daddy. I just had fun.”

Twitter is this crazy new service for teenage girls that let’s them update their friends all day long so everyone knows what everyone else is doing. It’s like the status message on your IM client, but instead of changing between “Idle” and “Away” and “Online” you can tell your friends that you are “going shopping,” “getting my hair done” or “shaving my legs” and those status messages can be broadcast to their phones.

This year at SxSW, its the Year of Twitter. They have monitors that show you a stream of Twitter statuses and my whole team is getting Twitter update text messages on their cell phones around the clock.

The crazy thing is that as long as I’m hanging out with them, I don’t need to use the Twitter service myself.

I just listen:

“Now C.K. is going to take a shower.”

“Now C.K. is having a meatgasm.”

“Now C.K. is awake.”

“Now C.K. is having lunch lunch lunch.”

“Now C.K.’s parrots are fighting.”

“Now C.K. is telling an awesome muffin joke.”

If a store has a big international cheese section, I usually poke around and look for my favorite Norwegian cheese, Nökkelost. It’s a light yellow cow’s milk cheese with caraway seeds in it.

Sadly, the most popular Norwegian cheese is Gjetost, a nasty medium brown goat’s milk cheese.

My mom was trying to get me to eat a Gjetost sandwich when I was about 12 and when I refused she handed one to my dad and said that he eats it and I should too. My dad took a bite and spit it back out and told me I didn’t have to eat Gjetost. My mom was angry that he didn’t cooperate, but I’ve never forgotten that moment.

Even at Norwegian import stores you can buy all sorts of other ethnic food, but they never have Nökkelost. They say it doesn’t come in very often and when it does it gets bought up and disappears quickly. Well, of course it does — the other cheese you sell is nasty!

So I did a little research last night and I found out more about these two cheeses. Nökkelost even has a Wikipedia page. In it I learned that my favorite Norwegian cheese is flavored with cumin, caraway seeds and cloves, is “expensive and somewhat rare” and that an American version was made in the 1960s by Kraft. It was called “Caraway” then later called “Kuminost Spiced Cheese” and it vanished in the 1970s.

Then I found an online store where I can buy my “expensive and rare” cheese. It’s $57.66 for a 2.2 pound wheel. Holy cheeses! That’s like a whole tank of gas. It’s a good thing my birthday is coming up soon…

So I’m no longer a comic book convention virgin. (Hmm, there’s got to be a joke in that line somewhere. Maybe it’s too obvious.)

NYCC was a blast — the perfect way to spend a weekend while your family is out of town.

I got to cross three more comic giants off of my list — David Mazzucchelli, Bill Sienkiewicz and Chris Claremont — and I even met them in the order I had them in my last post. Wild.

I left some people off of my hit list who were not scheduled to be at the conference, but ones I plan to meet in the future. Frank Miller, John Byrne, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Jerry Ordway and there are easily a few dozen more who escape me because I’ve been out of comics for so long.

Plus I still need that solid 60 second conversation with Stan Lee so I can thank him for that 11th birthday tour.