I was doing some birthday shipping for my wife a few weeks back.  I actually had to hold off on posting this write up because I didn’t want to tip her off to what sorts of things she might expect for her birthday.

This post isn’t about her birthday, however, but rather Amazon and their collaborative filtering mechanism which makes recommendations to you while you are shopping.  Given that the search term with which I started was “gymnastics mats,” I can understand 4 of the 6 of these recommendations.  I can even go out on a limb and convince myself that, yes, people who are likely to be buying gym mats need to keep deer away.  Think of the liabilities to the gym studios when that first deer hurts themself.  The rules just aren’t set up for four legged participants.  Sadly, Bambi and her friends are really into gymnastics, and they keep hanging around.

It was the book recommendation that really piqued my attention.  The book itself is a parable style yarn about leadership and psychology.  Think “Chicken Soup for the Bad Manager.”  The scary thing is that I have read this book.  My manager suggested it as one of those great books I needed to read.

So I am left wondering what type of people are buying gymnastics mats from Amazon.  Are they type A business execs who are fashioning home gyms for their gymnastics bound children?  Are they incredibly driven, though perhaps misguided, leaders who are building gymnasiums?  Or is this simply a case of Amazon having a bit of fun with me, knowing that I read that book, and that I have deer eating the grass in my yard?

So I’m sick.  Sick and travel are never fun.  Recycled air on the plane is usually the culprit.  Sick sucks.  In particular, it sucks when you are out of your element.  Travelling in the US usually affords you the ability to walk into any familiar looking pharmacy and choose the appropriate cold medicine from the dizzying array of choices.

International travel comes with its challenges, but most of my travel for the last few years has been to familiar western culture countries.  When you get sick, you can at least understand some of what you are seeing in the store.  Identifying the cold medicine in Barcelona, even with Catalan, was doable.  My Spanish is passable enough that I can get by in most western European countries.  Well, Finland was challenging, but they speak very good English.

China is an all together different problem.  First, the character set is foreign to me.  Second, Beijing is huge.  HUGE.  I am having trouble orienting myself because no matter what direction I look, there are buildings.  Lots of buildings.  This is the first city I have ever been in where I didn’t immediately know where I could walk from my hotel to get basic snacks/soda.  I’m staying in a relatively nice hotel too, but there is no shop in the hotel.  Oh, and English is not a first class language here, so good luck when you have to deal with the local shop owner.  Hit or miss.

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Does anyone know what this screen cap is from?  If not, you can watch this video clip here.  This one movie scene sums up my experience with the iPad.  Awkwardness.

I want to love the iPad.  I do.  I love the idea of the simplicity of it.  I smile when I think about the potential for the iPad and my young kids.  Educational software takes on a whole new meaning when you can combine the compactness of the device with the touch screen.  The video playback, and the battery life, are wonderful.  Web browsing is snappy.  There’s just that one x-factor which is holding this back for me.

My main problem with the iPad is that I cannot get comfortable with it.  I found it very odd how many times Steve talked about getting comfortable with the iPad in a chair during his keynote when he introduced the device.  It now makes me think he doth protested too much.  We got a few of these on campus – two are sitting in an office across the hall from me.  I haven’t figured out how I am going to sit in a chair with this thing.  If I am laying on a couch with my beloved Kindle, I can hold it up above my face with little effort.  The iPad is just a touch too heavy for that.  The curved back makes for weirdness when you want to lay it on a table and type.  There aren’t four corners touching the table, so it spins around.

Since I don’t own one, I await my friends to tell me their long term experiences with the device.  My gut is telling me that more and more reports are going to be coming out about how people aren’t sure how to hold/handle the iPad and be comfortable at the same time.

ABC has an awesome hit show on their hands with Modern Family.  While there isn’t anyone who can hold a candle to the sheer personality awesomeness of NPH on How I Met Your Mother, the cast and writing on Modern Family are genius.  It’s very rare that I laugh out loud at television, certainly not consistently week to week.  Well, except Family Guy.

This week, however, presented some comedy for both the wife and I.  A rarity, though this is the only sitcom we watch together.  You can view the episode on Hulu, and the scene in question is at 1:00 in to the show.  It’s a gem, and basically cured my wife of any thoughts that she might be crazy.

Ty Burrell may be the the nerdy father we all cringe at, but secretly know we are, but Julie Bowen is a real hidden gem in this show.  Her timing and delivery are under utilized, though she is often over shadowed by the Sofia Vergara.

There’s a great podcast I have been listening to since 2006 called Keith and the Girl.  The content is most definitely NSFW, but discovering this gem was like finding Howard Stern before everyone knew about it.  It’s a fantastic show, and they have also done a great job of building community around it.  As of this morning, in the 5 years they have been doing the show, they have had 60 tattoos and 2 brandings of their logo.  Crazy.

In any event, Keith and Chemda (the “girl”) are publishing a book on Mar 9th called “What Do We Do Now?”  They get lots of relationship type questions emailed to them from listeners, answering some on the air, and eventually got a book deal.  Awesome.

Here’s the nutty part which I never knew.  I’m sure authors are well aware of this, but all pre-order sales for a book count toward your first week sales number.  It’s an interesting game you can play as an author, especially one who shows up with an audience, in that you can promote the book well in advance of the release, get the core audience purchases to land you on the best seller lists, and then in store placements which result will likely have a multiplier effect on sales thereafter.  I love it.

If you want a good laugh, go read their sample chapter, or pre-order the book.  They do the show for free and make money from ads and merchandise sales.  Why not buy yourself or someone you know a copy and help get these guys on the best seller lists in the first weeks?  I plan to post my video review later in the week, but I just loved this idea of hacking the best seller list and wanted to share.

Apple released their iPad today and lead with this claim:

There are more than enough bloggers looking to give their opinions on the topic, so I will avoid that morass.  I want to reserve final judgment until I play with it, but I did come away feeling like this scene from History of the World was more appropriate.

The rumor mills and speculation are running at fever pitch.  I really should have predicted that 2010 would be the year of the tablet.  With bloggers falling all over themselves trying to get the scoop on the Apple table, it seems that the bloggers are trying to call a tablet from Microsoft to be announced tonight, though Mary Jo says “I don’t think so.”  With all that in mind, I was trying to figure out how to explain the world of tech in which we live.

Any unannounced, but speculated on, Apple product lives at the intersection of Impossible, Inspiring and In-Demand.  People may scoff at the notion of “in-demand” being applied to a table, but Bing tells me that there are 22.5 million results for Apple Tablet.

In an effort to save a lot of pain and suffering for those people who don’t want to read an incredibly long blog post, I have a nice little summary table.  The predictions run the gamut of my personal and professional interests, so they may not be 100% interesting to all people.

• 99% of All Decade Lists That Come This Year Will Be Wrong
• Twitter Will Become A Footnote
• Real Time Has Had It’s Time
• Interest Rates Will Begin To Rise
• Housing Prices Being To Stall And Then Fall
• Jorge Lorenzo Will Win MotoGP World Championship
• Netbook Market Disappears
• Apple’s Disdain For Developers Will Reach A Tipping Point
• ChromeOS Proves To Be Another Of Google’s Failures
• The Final Season Of Lost Will Not Be Seen
• Foundations For The Repeal Of Sarb-Ox
• The Venture Business, As We Know It, Is Dead
• Oil Trading Draws Legislative Scrutiny
• Windows Mobile 7 Will Impress
• Tim Tebow Will Play No Downs That Matter At QB

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About 3 weeks ago, I wrote this article about the Kindle, and mentioned how I thought that for various reasons attached to the Kindle, I was actually going to be reading more.

Shortly thereafter, I got a ping on Facebook from someone I didn’t know.  His name is Brad Stone, and he identified himself as a journalist and he had some questions about my blog post.  I rang him up, and we spoke for a while.  In today’s NY Times is the article he was writing.

The point in sharing this is (aside for a shameless plug, and an attempt to get people to say “awwwwww” about my daughter) to underscore how very important social media is becoming, and how it has the ability to make things happen, quickly.  I am sure that social networks are allowing journalists to identify source material in a much more efficient way than ever before.  However, more interestingly, is the how quickly the turnaround happened from when I wrote the post to when Brad contacted me.

The sign lives inside one of the buildings here on the Microsoft campus, and to me it’s awesome for all the wrong reasons.

I am sure that there is an argument to be made that this sign does in fact make sense.  The numbers progress, sort of.  Perhaps the person who put this together has never had to actually walk inside of a building and find a cube or office.  It’s entirely possible that they simply hate people altogether.  Whatever the justification, I don’t get it.  I was staring at this sign for way too long trying to figure out where I needed to go.