suiting up with mr. camby (nyt)
marcus camby has a yearly clothing budget higher than the average person's salary, but he does his own ironing. and the man knows how to play ball. a weird behind-the-scenes look at how basketball players end up so well dressed.
( Saturday, April 29, 2000)

$400/month for your car (wired)
"So isn't there something a bit creepy about ads taking over private property? Is nothing safe from the spread of the almighty forces of America's marketing industry?"

Well, of course there is. Just as there is something creepy about Rem Koolhaas' designs for new Prada stores, which include (privatized) "public" space. Though at least in the later case a corporation is providing a civic amenity that most municipalities would rather not have anymore.
( Saturday, April 29, 2000)

privacy.com (nyt)
" The inhibiting effects on creativity and efficiency are palpable. Surveys of the health consequences of monitoring in the workplace have suggested that electronically monitored workers experience higher levels of depression, tension and anxiety and lower levels of productivity than those who are not monitored. Unsure about when, precisely, electronic monitoring may take place, employees will necessarily be far more guarded and less spontaneous, and the increased formality of conversation and e-mail can make communication less efficient. Moreover, spying on people without their knowledge is an indignity. It fails to treat its objects as fully deserving of respect, and treats them instead like animals in a zoo, deceiving them about the nature of their own surroundings."
...
"We are trained in this country to think of all concealment as a form of hypocrisy. But perhaps we are about to learn how much may be lost in a culture of transparency -- the capacity for creativity and eccentricity, for the development of self and soul, for understanding, friendship and even love. There is nothing inevitable about the erosion of privacy in cyberspace, just as there is nothing inevitable about its reconstruction. We have the ability to rebuild some of the private spaces we have lost. What we need now is the will."

This long essay, despite some misunderstandings of the technologies in question, raises some important issues vis-a-vis privacy in the new, networked economy. When every appliance has computing power attached, an exponential amount of information about you can be collected.

In my mind all of this points towards David Foster Wallace's take on video phones in Infinite Jest, which was that citizens came up with ever-more elaborate means of circumventing the inconveniences of the medium, until they disappeared in favor of the regular old telephone. I can imagine that happening with appliances and computers, too.
( Saturday, April 29, 2000)

the unsung heroes of silicon valley (standard)
"The majority of the Valley's janitors are represented by the Service Employees International Union. Salvador Bustamante, the union's lead organizer in Northern California, accuses companies such as Cisco of hiding behind a technicality. "When it's time for them to take responsibility for the situation, they wash their hands," he says. "They say, 'Well, they don't work for me, they work for contractor X.' Yet [companies] set the terms under which the contractor is brought in to clean a facility."

"The union plans to turn up the heat in Silicon Valley, especially under the area's most successful businesses. The contract between the union and a consortium of outside firms expires at the end of May. And though only representatives from these janitorial firms will be at the bargaining table, the union recognizes that their best weapon will be to place the spotlight on the image-conscious tech companies. The pending battle, whatever the outcome, is certain to generate plenty of noise – and to serve as a flash point for the growing tensions between the Valley's rich and poor."

One day they'll all just stop cleaning up after the overpaid zillionaire kids. Maybe the teachers, firemen, and low-level city employees will join the general strike, and then we'll have a large-scale, serious discussion about societal priorities.

Yeah, right.
( Friday, April 28, 2000)

another crash-and-burn.com (business week)
"Although Value America is just months from running out of cash, Winn is set for life. He lives just three minutes from the company's Charlottesville headquarters on a 150-acre estate, where he has built a Greek Revival mansion modeled on George Washington's Mount Vernon. Both Winn and Scatena, who served as outside counsel to Winn's earlier bankrupt venture, have been feverishly dumping their stock since being forced out of the company in November. Winn has personally realized cash gains of about $53.7 million and still has an additional $15.5 million worth of stock. Winn's backers have not fared so well. Allen has lost roughly $50 million, according to public filings. The personal and company losses of FedEx founder Smith approach $8 million."

It's a big red flag when the CEO of a dotcom is cashing out lots of shares. CEOs who are in it for the long haul, like Bezos, Dell, and Gates, don't sell shares very often. People like Naveen Jain, InfoSpace's CEO, who has sold some $2 billion (that's with a 'b') worth of stock, are demonstrably in it for the money.

We will see a lot of these stories over the rest of this year, as more companies fulfill Barron's predictions and find themselves the targets of shareholder class-action suits. Though the biggest losers, of course, are always the lower-level employees.
( Friday, April 28, 2000)

iran (nyt)
the religious right, which still holds a lot of the power, has closed every one of the newspapers that could be considered reformist or liberal. there are parliamentary elections next week. politics as usual.

i am hoping that khatami can pull off the reformer kick. i think iran would be in much better shape liberalizing than, say, russia, was.
( Friday, April 28, 2000)

bomb.com (new york)
"In my bedroom, in my bottom two dresser drawers, I maintain (to my wife's annoyance) a fossil record of the Internet business in the form of 40 or so T-shirts carrying logos of Internet companies that have long since faded from the earth (my wife wants to sell them on eBay). The Internet, in other words, as my T-shirts remind me, far from being -- or along with being -- the most remarkable business story since the advent of the industrial age, the greatest wealth-creating machine in the history of the world (according to John Doerr, the greatest venture capitalist in the history of the world), is also the story of fairly unremitting business carnage. Vastly more companies over the course of the commercial Internet's six-year life span have failed than have succeeded."

(link and quote courtesy Maura)
( Thursday, April 27, 2000)

chernobyl
happened fourteen years ago today. it is one of the most important things that happened in the later half of the twentieth century, but a lot of people don't know anything about it.

i was once confronted with blank looks after i mentioned the word. more blank stare upon uttering "gorbachev." it made me sad. that was four years ago.
( Wednesday, April 26, 2000)

the five stages of freelance-dom (guru)
"As their careers gain traction, the feast/famine syndrome and accompanying cash flow problems start to settle down. Gurus start feeling more confident that they'll make their monthly nut, and that makes a huge psychological difference. They know that work can still be tough at times, but at least they'll survive. They still wrestle with the occasional bad client and professional isolation, but at least they aren't as worried about imminent destitution."
( Tuesday, April 25, 2000)

any to any. end to end.
i once used the illo on page 8 (in like 1987) for my zine "perception". it had the guy standing up saying "life is hell!" and someone around the table saying "no it isn't!" something like that.
( Tuesday, April 25, 2000)

skirts get longer (nyt)
actually, while i think it's better to see women in longer skirts, i have to admit that a flash of leg can make my day. or make me stop. i'll settle for ankles though.
( Monday, April 24, 2000)

is harvard worth it? (fortune)
"Then Alan Krueger, an economist at Princeton, and Stacy Berg Dale, a researcher at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, designed just such a study. In a widely publicized report, released by the National Bureau of Economic Research last year, they found no economic advantage in attending a selective college. Their research looked at the 1976 freshman class at 30 schools, ranging in selectivity (determined by average SAT scores) from Yale to Denison. The colleges were mostly private but included a few public universities: the University of Michigan, Ohio's Miami University, Penn State, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dale and Krueger compared the earnings of students who were admitted to the same colleges but made different choices."

for the record, i'll tell you that i turned down harvard in 1994 to go to grad school at rice. which is a bit different than undergraduate admissions, but still.
( Monday, April 24, 2000)

more dot com dog backlash (nyt)
"Maybe the key to the dog code lies in the mathematics of Internet time. Dogs pack seven years of their lives into a single calendar year. Those working at Internet companies like to think they're packing seven years of their lives into a single day. The dot-com mantra -- 24/7/365 -- speaks either to a constancy of purpose or the inability to get one's work done during normal business hours.

"Or maybe the dog in the manger -- sorry, typo -- in the manager's office, signifies the mongrelization of work and personal life. A decade ago, PCs and e-mail let people set up home offices and spend more time with their families. Today's pervasive Web technologies seem to encourage some companies to think of the office as home and the employees as surrogate families."
( Monday, April 24, 2000)

startup meltdown (standard)
"The younger, more junior employees thought ePatients should be headquartered in San Francisco, home to many Internet ventures. There also were complaints by startup veterans about a team that was top-heavy with managers, most of whom made around $150,000 per year, and a work ethic that permitted employees and executives to leave promptly at 5 each night. Then there was the rat maze of cubicle dividers that some thought were antithetical to an Internet company, where employee interaction is crucial. "It just didn't feel like a startup," says former ePatients employee Steve Lin [no relation]. "People weren't sleeping under their desks.""

Just one sign that a lot of people are in this only for the money. This story as a whole is a good look at what happens when people who don't have any idea at all how a business works try to operate way above their own level.
( Monday, April 24, 2000)

zero to startup in nine months (standard)
"Meanwhile they were putting out other fires, most notably on the Web site. Hochman and Levin had hired Organic Online to do part of the work and systems integrator Q Strategies of Irvine, Calif., to do the rest. Six weeks in, they hit a snag. Organic's e-commerce platform didn't include a critical component to connect the online store's cash-register function with Norm Thompson's warehouse-inventory control. With different partners working on different pieces, "it took us a while to figure [it] out," Hochman says.

"The simplest remedy would have been to hook up with a fulfillment outsourcer that had the missing technology in place. But they liked Norm Thompson, so they opted to rebuild the site from scratch, shifting development work from Organic to Q Strategies, which used an e-commerce platform that had the missing technology."
( Monday, April 24, 2000)

yournamehere.com (standard)
carl's simplified how-to on dotcom naming.
( Monday, April 24, 2000)

naming the dotcom (standard)
"In short, the areas in which dot-coms most often fall down – site navigation and customer service – have the greatest impact on their success or failure. No matter how many high-priced consultants you hire, naming sessions you hold and foreign dictionaries you devour, if your site doesn't deliver the goods you might as well be Deadmeat.com (an actual site, by the way, but more literary than e-commerce-related)."

Also mentioned is the fact that dotcoms suck at branding. Part of that is because a lot of the people in charge of these companies don't think of marketing as a top-line number. They think, as Acer did, that when sales are down you should pull back on marketing. This, of course, can lead to a quickening spiral in revenues.

Or companies are like WholeFoods, who advertised wholefoods.com (and is advertising wholepeople.com) solely in its stores, which meant that the only people who knew about it were existing bricks-and-mortar customers. Not a great way to increase sales online.
( Monday, April 24, 2000)

the dangers of online journals (salon)
"And now people are being held accountable for their words. Initially journals could get you in trouble with your friends, families and lovers. Now journals get you in trouble with your employers and, in some instances, incite legal action."

I know that my former boss was forwarding things I'd written for listless to other people working on our project. It almost prevented a company from offering me even an interview. Just another reason to take it down.
( Sunday, April 23, 2000)

already?
i thought it would take a bit longer for this site to start devolving. it's already happened. amazing how quickly consistency goes out the window when a company lays off everyone who'd built the site and both art directors have left. god, what a disappointment.
( Sunday, April 23, 2000)

coach zen (nyt)
"Jackson has contrived a way to rebel against and yet not entirely reject his pastor parents by becoming a Wizard of Oz who insists on stepping out from behind the curtain to let the whole group play with the control switches. He is an authority figure whose authority derives from his strategic willingness to deconstruct that authority."
( Sunday, April 23, 2000)

ipo slowdown (standard)
"The legend of the Internet IPO – stocks that would triple, quadruple, quintuple in their first day of trading – is no more than a fond memory. Now Internet IPOs often come public and head lower – when they can be completed at all."

See also 10 April 2000.
( Thursday, April 20, 2000)

dot com options become worthless (nyt)
"The result, analysts say, is the first significant challenge to the notion that options are the most desirable form of pay in the new economy. In response, companies are scrambling to solve morale problems that many have never before faced.

"This market decline has exposed the dark underbelly of going public," said Roger McNamee, a partner at Integral Capital Partners. "If you can't keep your team together, it's hard to make a real company.""
( Wednesday, April 19, 2000)

worry.com (nyt)
"In the much-heralded exodus from old-line companies to dot-com start-ups in recent years, while some voyagers have found great wealth, others are finding the promised land does not offer the riches or satisfaction they had expected. Not everyone finds it easy to adjust to bosses who will not focus, work spaces that double as kennels and a culture in which self-conscious jollity comes at the expense of real work."
( Wednesday, April 19, 2000)

sexual-harassment.com (nyt)
"Those that do not take such issues seriously are looking for trouble, Mr. Mathiason says. "Right now, you're not seeing as much litigation as you might expect" in the dot-com world, he said. That is partly because the economy is so robust that would-be plaintiffs are "getting six job offers on the way to their lawyers' offices," Mr. Mathiason said.

But the minute the economy slows, he warned, disgruntled employees will have fewer opportunities to move on and will be more likely to go after their deep-pocketed former employers. "It will be like an earthquake hit," he said."

Another indicator. The future of this industry is much like the present of many other industries: bureaucracy and a more professional culture. Or at least one can hope so.
( Wednesday, April 12, 2000)

the hunger site, again
a click a day helps keep hunger away. (maybe)
( Wednesday, April 12, 2000)

wallpaper*
this is flashy, but it's just a bunch of coming attractions. the use of line art overlays is really nice, though.
( Tuesday, April 11, 2000)

yoo
Philippe Starck teams with developers to offer (expensive) designed lofts. When I first read about this project in a New York article, I started wondering if he needed an architect-turned-graphic designer.
( Tuesday, April 11, 2000)

the end of the beginning (standard)
"In the short term, the volatility led a few firms to delay their IPOs. But longer-term effects might be under way: Investors and VCs are holding the dot-coms to a new standard. They want to see companies that are moving toward reporting an honest profit, free of financial engineering.

"Already, many investment bankers and research analysts say that overcrowded sectors on the Internet will thin out, allowing a set of even stronger companies to emerge."

This is what I've been saying will happen for a while, for a number of reasons. It's also why I'm no longer disappointed over losing all of my pre-IPO WholePeople options: I don't think they'll ever be profitable, and the window of opportunity for unprofitable companies' IPOs is closing fast.
( Monday, April 10, 2000)

revolutionary (nyt)
"Whether or not that qualifies as revolutionary, one must acknowledge that the very idea of the scanning pen qualifies as profound change. In the old days, documents came out of pens, whereas now documents go into them. And if the pen is mightier than the sword, imagine the might of the Micro Scan Pen, and what Jean Valjean would have done with it."
( Monday, April 10, 2000)

the oed's new format (nyt)
"As an expression of displeasure, pile of pants is generally used in connection with pop culture, as in the example now immortalized in the O.E.D. "Yup, this is a pile of pants," a reviewer said of a rock concert last year in The Glasgow Herald, "and no amount of hip paranoia is going to convince me otherwise.""

idiometric.com was planned to be an online dictionary of idiom, with some more leeway for sources (i.e. verbal) than what the o.e.d. gives. but the programmer who had promised to code the backend flaked, so now it's as dead as the idiom i was interested in. but maybe i'll get it going this year.
( Monday, April 10, 2000)

strikeout.com (nyt)
"No one, if the anecdotal evidence gathered from single men and women in bars and on the street can be trusted, is happy. Everyone complains. The men complain that the women are too few and too hard to get; the women, that the men don't bother with them or even know how to try."
...
"Julie Paiva, of Table for Six Total Adventures and Entertainment, which arranges dinner dates with three women and three men with similar interests, said one of the big problems in Silicon Valley these days was that the women were too picky."
( Sunday, April 9, 2000)

martha realizes why the suburbs suck: they're all the same (nyt)
"The independent Westport cinemas closed -- all four of them -- forcing avid late-night moviegoers like me to drive to neighboring towns to impersonal multiplexes where ticket takers wouldn't save a ticket for a friend. My favorite coffee bar just around the corner disappeared, and with it a pleasant gathering place for residents doing grocery shopping or local errands. (There's now a Starbucks downtown.) The really good greengrocer was bought by a much larger company, and the country-store atmosphere was replaced by a more elitist, and much less charming, retail scheme. I felt I had nowhere to go any longer that offered me the small-town experience I craved, the personal service I was used to, the overt friendliness that I loved."
( Saturday, April 8, 2000)

more web voyeurism
well, sort of.
( Friday, April 7, 2000)

tasty (salon)
"Meanwhile good taste today isn't taste at all, it's predigested and textureless and anything but personal. But what can you expect in a country where every single city has a street with a Starbuck's, a Barnes and Noble, a Banana Republic, a Gap and a Pottery Barn on it? Places like Planet Hollywood are denigrated as prefabricated, tacky imitations of the real thing, yet each town is slowly transformed into a cartoonish theme park of undifferentiated, overly "designed" mass consumerism."
( Wednesday, April 5, 2000)

adult life (suck)
you can't be quite so punk rock when you own expensive furniture, either.
( Wednesday, April 5, 2000)

shorten your work week! (guru)
the advice contained herein is solid. the main point is that it is all mental. at one point during my time at acer i decided that i was going to be working from 8:45 to 4:45, and that was it. (the times were based on the train schedule.) i told everyone what time i would be leaving every day, and made sure i left on time. i got so much more work done.

btw, studies show that if everyone knows they are expected to leave by a certain time (i.e. 6pm) they get more work done faster. it's psychlogical: you have a daily deadline that you have to meet.

everyone should set their own deadlines. personally, i wish a couple of my friends would start leaving the office by 6 consistently; they'd be much happier about work.
( Wednesday, April 5, 2000)

identity crisis (standard)
"Rather than compete, traditional and interactive agencies often work in tandem on the same accounts – with the interactive agencies providing the more-technical services that Madison Avenue doesn't offer."
( Monday, April 3, 2000)

absinthe
this place has one of the best brunches in town.
( Monday, April 3, 2000)

startup tips (webmonkey)
"Sign on the dotted line of that nondisclosure agreement and suddenly your entire life changes. For the next six months, you don't see your friends, your mate, or the light of day."

A guide to what can happen in startup life. Remember, though, that the days of big trucks of money through thousands of ten cent options (e.g. Amazon, Yahoo) are pretty much gone, unless you're extremely lucky.
( Monday, April 3, 2000)

identity theft (nyt)
"Bradbury said she was initially told by credit card companies and the San Diego police department that they could not help track down the identity thief because such cases were too hard to investigate. But after a San Francisco real estate agent called her in December to tell her someone was trying to rent an apartment in her name, Bradbury took action herself."
( Sunday, April 2, 2000)

fulfillment is job one (standard)
"First, it means that the skepticism that venture capitalists and many others have recently begun to display toward online retailing is likely to intensify. Online vendors of general merchandise will find that they simply can't compete with the efficiencies of a Wal-Mart in moving goods from the factory to the home; successful retailers will be specialists who are not competing with the local mall."

Anyone who's dealt with ecommerce issues knows that fulfillment is the most important thing. The smart ones know it before they start building the site.
( Sunday, April 2, 2000)

the net meets common sense (standard)
"Usually you could tell at a glance who belonged to what world. (For instance, the Net people obediently wore their conference badges around their necks at all times, displaying their names and corporate identities in huge type. The Hollywood people managed to hide their badges inside pockets or under sweaters, creating an air of mystery about who they actually were.)"

This has more to do with the fact that most people who work for large high-tech companies must prominently display badges at all times. I kept mine in my back pocket, ready for display, but I wouldn't have gotten away with that at someplace like Intel.

At one point, I had three different badges in my bike messenger bag -- one for each of my Silicon Valley clients.
( Sunday, April 2, 2000)

ceo contracts
did you know that a ceo's contract is, legally, a publicly accessbile document? ask your favorite publicly-traded company for its ceo's contract and see what you find. the people behind this site found a lot.
( Saturday, April 1, 2000)