“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”
-Randy Pausch
Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, who is dying from pancreatic cancer, gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007. He speaks about achieving your childhood dreams and enabling the dreams of others.
I’ll tell you what: he really nailed this lecture. If you haven’t already watched this, you should (and make your kids watch, too). What a great human being Professor Pausch is - my deepest sympathies to him and his family.
By the way, in this lecture, he jokingly mentions his two childhood dreams were playing in the NFL and being Captain Kirk on Star Trek. These dreams have since come true: He recently scrimmaged with the Pittsburgh Steelers and got to say a line in a new Star Trek film.
A few years ago I bought a headlamp for hiking, camping, night bicycle riding, and other rough-and-tumble activities. What I never expected was that it would become an invaluable tool that I’d rely on nearly every day in modern life.
You see, my girlfriend generally likes to go to sleep at a time that is a little too early for me (she also wakes up a little earlier)… I’d like to keep reading for another hour or so. So what’s a guy to do? I have a few options:
Turn the lights off in the bedroom and go read in another room
Keep the lights on and ask her to put something over her eyes
Turn the lights off, and use a freakin’ a headlamp
I’ve exercised all of these options countless times… but the first two are not optimal. Using the headlamp is the best way to go in most situations. I know what you’re thinking: Wow, what a dork. Well, you’re right. But it’s also pretty fun(ny), and I have no shame.
If you’re thinking of telling me I should use one of those crappy book lights, let me save you the time. I’ve tried a few of them and they are awful. They only really work on a few types of books (nothing too old, no small paperbacks), and they definitely don’t work on most magazines.
The headlamp is the way to go - a powerful, highly-focused spotlight shining only on the section you’re reading…. and compatible with all paper-media formats.
I recommend the Princeton Tec EOS, but really, any headlamp should do the trick. Happy night reading!
Yan Bezugliy at ProBargainHunter.com created a Shopzilla Wordpress Plugin that makes price comparison integration within a blog post insanely easy. Users just need to provide their own Publisher ID and API key to use it (those can be attained by registering for the Shopzilla Publisher Program).
Here’s an example of the plugin in action, comparing the prices on Robert Fagles’ translation of Virgil’s Aeneid:
Seth Godin says Internet shoe retailer Zappos wants you to use their customer support services:
Zappos wants you to call their 800 number. They want you to order too many shoes. They want you to return (at their expense) the shoes that don’t fit.
This is so diametrically opposite of how many companies function today - and indeed, it is to their loss. A few weeks ago I wrote about consumers who are greedy with customer service resources and push companies to the limits. With the exception of that very small group, firms should in fact strive for that additional contact with the customer.
At each contact, it is another chance to exceed expectations and to solidify the relationship. A marketing professor of mine once shared an anecdote about a study conducted by a hotel franchise. The study looked at three groups of hotel guests:
Visitors who had a great stay, with no problems, whatsoever
Visitors who had a bad stay (unresolved issues)
Visitors who had a bad experience of some sort or another, but the hotel bent-over-backward and resolved the issues (they gave 110%)
I’m sure you can guess which guests were most likely to return AND refer their friends - Group 3! That’s because the hotel not only resolved the issue, but they exceeded the customer’s expectations by offering even more.
That’s why Seth Godin says Zappos wants you to return your shoes. They want to show you how awesome they are at taking care of you. They want that extra contact with you so that you can come to the conclusion that “Hey, shopping with Zappos is easy and I know they will take care of me if I have a problem.”
If your company isn’t following this model, you’re literally bleeding a large portion of your customers and losing in the loyalty game. The customers you’re leaving behind will not only shop at another company next time around, but they’ll also tell their friends how awful you are.
Seth Godin thinks it’s hard to be as good as Zappos when it comes to service. I disagree. I just think that the upfront costs are high and many firms are unwilling to make that sacrifice for long-term gain.
Jason Calacanis delivered a great keynote to kick-off Affiliate Summit West ‘08 back in February. If you are in the content business on the Internet, you should watch this:
Are affiliate marketers polluting the river? Some certainly are, and hopefully this keynote inspired a few of the guilty to conduct some thoughtful introspection.
I think Calacanis’ death-of-Usenet analogy is particularly interesting. However, I also think Google will continue to wage its war against spam, and I don’t envision the spammers winning it out.
I recently had the privilege of attending an advance screening of the documentary Young @ Heart. What a truly great film this is. It is my understanding that it was originally made for British TV, but this clearly has much higher aspirations than that.
The film follows the acclaimed, Massachusetts-based Young@Heart Chorus for 7 weeks as they prepare for a new tour. What makes this group so unique is that the average age is over 80 years old and they sing rock music (everything from Sonic Youth to James Brown). And boy can they sing! Young @ Heart is both hilarious and inspiring (not to mention heart breaking). My words do it little justice, so watch the trailer right now:
It will be opening in select theaters across North America on April 9th, so check your theater.
In the meantime, you can read this original poem from the beloved star, Fred Knittle, who coincidentally also sings Coldplay’s Fix You… a version way better than the original:
For anyone who recently tried to view this site in Internet Explorer, my apologies for the following error message that you probably received:
Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site.
Operation aborted.
This pop-up message occurred because the default ScratchBack JavaScript code that I used tries to modify the parent container from inside a child <div> container. The original code given to me from ScratchBack looked like this:
This code works fine on Firefox and Apple’s Safari browser. Unfortunately, due to a bug within Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers (5.5 - 7), the error message gets displayed, preventing the page from loading. For anyone else experiencing the same issues, I hacked the ScratchBack code to the following (obviously it will be slightly different for your widget ID):
This corrects the problem in IE, and there doesn’t seem to be any discernible difference in viewing the page in Firefox or Safari. The widget works as it should.
Special thanks to my brother Mike for noticing this issue, since it probably would have lasted for months had he not brought it to my attention (indeed, it had already been broken for a few weeks).
This taught me a valuable lesson to check my site with Internet Explorer whenever I make a code change. Get with the times, folks, and please switch to Firefox already.
First, let me say the primary purpose of this blog is not to make money… it’s to share my personal thoughts and insights on numerous topics (primarily technology, politics, and American culture), and to hopefully spur some thoughtful discourse in return. For this reason, the blog as a whole can appear very disjointed, and I doubt that a very large body of readers would accumulate. If I was in this to make serious money, I’d stick to a single topic.
Nevertheless, I do include advertising on Politivi for several reasons:
It’s my job to stay current on Internet advertising and marketing trends. I work in affiliate marketing, so it is important that I stay ahead of the game. This blog (and other sites I have), allows me to be an engaged user of my own team’s product, as well as the web advertising solutions that other firms offer.
Advertising helps offset the hosting costs.
It’s fun to make a few pennies off of my work.
In addition to the normal sponsored ads/links that are clearly labeled, the content of this blog will sometimes include unmarked affiliate links (within a post’s body, as well as other places) to sites like Shopzilla, BizRate, Amazon, et al. The reasons for doing this are congruent with the reasons enumerated above. Beyond this, it’s just annoying to point out each time such a link occurs (plus you can usually see in the browser’s status bar if such a link is affiliate-encoded).
To be clear, none of the opinions expressed on this site are influenced by any advertisers. I take full responsibility for the nonsense expressed herein.
