The River

Hope to meet some more local folks tonight at The Bay Area Interactive Group (BIG)’s holiday get-together.

Well, according to the good folks at Intelliseek, Jon Stewart’s “Crossfire” appearance wins top honors. A well-deserved honor, too, I might add.

According to the press release:

Bloggers linked to the “Crossfire” transcript in their online commentaries 1,880 times in 2004, followed by 1,415 references to Slate.com’s “Unfairenheit 9/11: The Lies of Michael Moore” and 1,174 citations for the BBC’s obituary of radio DJ John Peel.

Meredith Roth is at it again, following up her “worst dressed list” with something a bit more positive. Let me just say I’m proud that five of my colleagues were mentioned (not bad, on a list of just 15).

I know you’re dying to know how I’ve been spending my time, since I’ve been such a bad blogger. Well… this weekend, we went to Ikea in Emeryville. Shockingly, it wasn’t terribly packed. My theory is that everyone’s doing their holiday shopping and not at a furniture store. Anyway, this being our second trip, we finally settled on an armoire in which to store our TV, etc.

The difficult thing — which we discovered, stupidly, after hours of complex assembly — is just how voluminous “etc.” is in this digital world. We have a receiver, a DVD player, a 32-inch TV, a Replay TV DVR unit, and, of course, a digital cable box. Though the armoire supposedly “fit most 32 inch TVs,” it didn’t fit ours. So we had to take out a shelf. Then, with the shelf out, we couldn’t fit all the rest of our goodies, even if we took off the little feet at the bottom of the receiver. Then, we also figured out that we’d never be able to get all of our cabling to occur in the way apparently intended by the Ikea folks. Somehow, they had us painstakingly nail in 50 tiny nails to adhere the fiberboard backing, which didn’t have ANY holes to allow for speaker wires, ethernet cables, RCA cables, or even power cords to protrude.

We had to tear off the back of the armoire. A hammer came in handy in that regard. It also helped ease a little frustration. We then tucked things in, very creatively, even hiding one box (which needs no remote control access) underneath. Now, you’d never know how close we came to junking the whole thing and trying to sell it on eBay. It almost looks… nice.

We were the ones to blame here because we didn’t do the basic measurements and initial research. But how in the world can a company sell a “TV Storage Unit” in this day and age that so aggressively fails to accommodate the digital lifestyle? Sure, it’s cheap, but I wouldn’t wish our Sunday of frustration on anyone.

(Meanwhile, our cable and cable modem access went out. The cable finally came back, but not the Internet. We are already growing to love Comcast, which can’t apparently find a moment — until next Saturday — to send over a technician.)

This is a little bit of an unusual post, but what’s the power of the Internet for if not for helping friends (and friends of friends). Just got an e-mail from Myles Weissleder of Meetup.com:

It’s not often one has to request this kind of help …

Soon after Meetup.com launched, members of bookcrossing.com, a fledgling web community where book lovers ‘set books free’, starting having Meetups in their towns to trade books and chat. And since, a wonderful community has flourished on- and off-line. (Over 4,500 Bookcrossing Meetups to date!)

It was a real shocker to learn a few weeks ago that Daniel Clune, the head programmer at bookcrossing.com, disappeared on November 6th in Sandpoint, Idaho.

Please consider this plea from a bookcrosser:

“His family is devastated and the community dumbfounded. A young, healthy man, Daniel, 29, is known for his reliability… a stand up guy. Not the sort to take off on a flight of fancy. No one believes that his disappearance is voluntary. Something happened to Daniel Clune, and his family and friends need to know just what that something is. Please consider featuring the story of Daniel’s disappearance. The key to finding him is out there somewhere, but has not yet been found. Exposure is badly needed.”

Some links:

http://finddanny.com/
http://www.bookcrossing.com/forum/5/1441038/22/subj_PLEASE-HELP
http://bookcrossing.meetup.com/

Maybe you can help spread the word?

Thank you.

-Myles (and the Meetup team)

I’m a bit late in posting this, but it turns out Daniel Clune’s body was found in late December. Sad story.

I’m a bit behind on blogging and just saw Seth Godin’s comment on how The Yellow Pages was the Internet of its day. Indeed.