Brian Alvey

I have all these posts I want to write about hanging out with my old college friend Chris and his family at Disney and my family and my Blogsmith dev team (who is staying at a nicer hotel here than we are), but I’m still in shock.

I was listening to the big band station on my music service a few months ago and heard a clever little Guy Lombardo song from 1949 called “Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think)” that seemed to be speaking directly to me. It came up again a few weeks ago and just seems appropriate given that Michael was a workaholic.

You work and work for years and years, you’re always on the go.
You never take a minute off, too busy makin’ dough.
Someday, you say, you’ll have your fun when you’re a millionaire.
Imagine all the fun you’ll have in your old rockin’ chair.

Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think!
Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink.
The years go by, as quickly as a wink.
Enjoy yourself. Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think.

You’re gonna take that ocean trip, no matter, come what may.
You’ve got your reservations made, but you just can’t get away.
Next year, for sure, you’ll see the world, you’ll really get around,
But how far can you travel when you’re six-feet under ground?

Your heart of hearts, your dream of dreams, your ravishing brunette,
She’s left you and she’s now become somebody else’s pet.
Lay down that gun don’t try my friend to reach the great beyond,
You’ll have more fun reaching for a redhead or a blond.

Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think!
Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink.
The years go by, as quickly as a wink.
Enjoy yourself. Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think.

You never go to nightclubs and you just don’t care to dance.
You don’t have time for silly things like moonlight and romance.
You only think of dollar bills tied neatly in a stack,
But when you kiss a dollar bill it doesn’t kiss you back.

Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think!
Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink.
The years go by, as quickly as a wink.
Enjoy yourself. Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think.

Niki and our favorite kennel owner Michael were extremely close. When she called the kennel this afternoon to check on our dogs, his assistant Alex said he had some really bad news. We never would have guessed that the news was that Michael died of a heart attack three days ago and that his funeral is tomorrow.

I’m in shock.

He used to watch our dog Duncan when we’d go away and Niki fell in love with the cute King Charles Cavalier Spaniels he bred, but he wouldn’t sell them to just anyone. When we tried to get one, somehow I failed his “good dog owner” test and we had to wait until his next litter to try again. I had a ton of respect for him. He was super direct, very blunt. I loved him.

A heart attack, damn. His dogs were his life. He worked all day long every day of the week. When other people were on vacation, he was there watching dogs. He spent decades as a trainer and groomer and had walls full of Westminster and other dog show ribbons.

On the outer edges of town, his kennel is probably the closest business to our house. Almost every time we drive in and out of our neighborhood we pass his kennel, which Jack calls “Michael’s house.”

He had no partners in his business. It will surely close its doors and we’re going to drive past it every day and be reminded of this great guy who died in his late forties, early fifties at age 47 who never took a break.

At least he loved the dogs he spent every waking minute with.

UPDATE: Although Michael was the sole owner of Stonybrook Kennels, Michael’s family and Alex — who worked with Michael for 22 of those 30 years, effectively his partner — are keeping Stonybrook going. That’s fantastic news because Stonybrook is popular and a lot of people had booked holiday boarding for their dogs way in advance.

“Drove downtown in the rain — nine-thirty on a Tuesday night, just to check out the late-night record shop. Call it impulsive. Call it compulsive. Call it insane. But when I’m surrounded I just can’t stop.”

I love the Barenaked Ladies’ song Brian Wilson. It’s a song about suffering from a mental block of giant proportions — about feeling like Wilson must have felt after a breakdown and a couple of years of seclusion. The cool thing about it is that Brian Wilson started touring again a few years ago and even opened with that song a couple of times.

My mom’s anniversary was last week, so I got her tickets to see Brian Wilson this Wednesday at the Beacon Theater.

Niki and I just saw Cheap Trick there on Thursday with Sarah from Blogging Stocks. Soul Asylum and Fastball opened for them. We missed all but Fastball’s last song, but I’ve seen them before and I’m a huge fan so I will definitely see them again in the future.

I’ve got the television on, playing Flight 26. I’m switching between blogging, IMs with Niki about Celly’s vacuum cleaner, catching up on email, managing Google calendar and doing some accounting work. I can do any one of those things plus listen to Flight 26 at the same time since everything but listening to the radio station is done on the same laptop screen.

One of the blogs I just visited that wasn’t about vacuum cleaners says that multi-tasking only works when the things you’re switching between are from different sources. Another point it makes is that larger screens let you do more things side-by-side so you get more done. I have a giant flat-screen monitor, but I don’t spend my day hooked up to it.

Maybe I should.

Joe Girardi won baseball’s National League manager of the year award six weeks after he was fired.

Since he’s an ex-Yankee (catcher, broadcaster and then bench coach) Niki and I were rooting for him as a manager. When he was let go, he reportedly called one of his mentors who comforted him by basically saying “welcome to the world of MLB managers” — like you haven’t really been a baseball manger until you’ve been canned.

I’ve thought about Joe Girardi a lot this week and how someone can look at a guy as effective and someone else can tell the same guy he’s ineffective and fire him.

And you wonder why I’m cynical.

Not the dude — the blog.

I could have called this “Too much photo and not enough Matt,” but I do enough of that.

Photomatt redesigned. His blog looks great.

Next step: convince him to use Blogsmith. Seriously!

Wow. When Jason told me he was leaving AOL, I thought he was just canceling his dial-up account. I figured he would call up AOL and a skilled representative would talk him out of his decision and he would extend his subscription another year and maybe get some free bonus hours.

Boy was I wrong: TechCrunch; NY Times; Jason’s blog.

I hope that tomorrow I don’t have to write a post called “Even more changes at AOL.”

I read this review of the Kansas City Chiefs post-Zeldman redesign a while ago when it first came out, but I re-read it today to see all of the comments it got. The blogger slams the Chiefs for replacing a happy, valid, web standards design with one built on Flash and more nested tables than you could shake a blink tag at.

I revisited it because I mentioned the Chiefs’ site the other day when summarizing the history of Blogsmith. I knew they were still using the same publishing system that Dave and I built, just with a new design that fits in more with the rest of the NFL and angering standardistas. The CMS was customizable enough to handle all kinds of designs — valid or not.

My favorite gripe in there was this one:

The homepage uses RealPlayer for the video. Who uses Real anymore? When you don’t have Real installed (does anybody?), you get a big image that says “you can’t view Chiefs TV.” Thanks, jackholes. (For added fun, when you roll over the Javascript dropdowns, the video stops working. Yay!)

Aw, you had me at “jackholes.”

I’m pretty sure that all of the NFL video is in Real format, so the Chiefs had no choice in the matter.

In the comments, they quote a really defensive email from Lance, who runs the site. That’s funny, since the Chiefs aren’t known for defense. (Zing! I couldn’t help myself.)

I know Lance and he’s a pretty good guy. I know Jeffrey and he’s one of the nicest guys I’ve ever worked with.

It’s admirable that this blogger is giving the Chiefs grief for parting ways with Zeldman and for taking a giant step backwards in their standards support, but to be fair, the Chiefs won like 13 games in a row the year before they redesigned with Zeldman and then had a losing season after the switch.

I would have redesigned and ditched web standards myself.

It’s the afternoon and I probably have less to say on the CEO replacement news today than I did yesterday. Maybe that’s because I’ve answered so many people in email and IM.

It’s the circle of life. I like Jon Miller and he seemed to like me. I told one person today that I wasn’t looking forward to breaking in another CEO — that the new one might like me or he might think I’m an idiot. We’ll see.

I’m a cynic and a bit of a burnout since things haven’t slowed down from startup mode since moving to AOL a year ago, so nothing really fazes me. I’m even a little optimistic: you’d hope that a guy with three decades at a major television network wouldn’t jump to AOL if it was a lost cause.

Again, we’ll see.

Jason wrote a warm post about former AOL CEO Jon Miller, calling him a “quiet samurai” and a mentor. I’ll do something like that myself tomorrow.

My cell phone and AIM have been ringing off the hook this evening since NBC’s Randy Falco was named the new CEO of AOL.

I need to post something that gives these people my take on the situation, but I should sleep on it. I can’t start spreading all of my crazy speculation tonight. I’ll should wait until I’ve had a chance to reflect on it all. Then I can go to town.