Thanksgiving Eating & Shooting Report

Here’s the rundown from a fun weekend.

We spent most of the weekend in Austin with our friends the Fenrichs and the Donovans. We all had a grand time, and the food was excellent.

The big kids got to eat their Thanksgiving meal outside.

We had a huge meal on Thursday, followed by lots of napping on the couch and football on the TV.

Cassidy and Remy spent much of their time in trees.

On Friday, Arnie and I shot sporting clays at the Capital City Trap & Skeet Club. It’s a nice facility with a good mix of stations, and very nice and helpful staff. They reciprocate with the Greater Houston Gun Club, so GHCC members get member rates there. I didn’t shoot all that well, but the weather was perfect and we had a good time. Afterwards, we met the rest of our families and the Donovans for dinner at El Arroyo, Raina’s favorite Austin restaurant.

I had to run a half marathon worth of miles last night, just to begin the process of recovering from all the good food I ate over the weekend.

This morning I was back out at GHGC, taking a shooting lesson from Bobby Fowler, Jr. I like the heck out of Bobby, and he is a fantastic instructor. He even had me hitting the rabbit shots, which have long been my Achilles’ heel (it turns out I was shooting over them, and needed to lower my barrel). My plan is to take a lesson or so each month from Bobby and see if I can raise my game a level. He wants me to enter some competitions, and I probably will. In preparation for that, I joined the National Sporting Clays Association.

Raina and the kids went to Galveston this morning with her parents. After shooting, I had a sushi lunch at Osaka. Now its off to do some chores.

Sorry, in Advance, But

For reasons I can’t fully explain, I think this photo is hilarious.

The Muppets Rock

I am really happy to live in a world where this is possible.

Are Good Ideas and Big Business Mutually Exclusive Concepts?

I knew when Intuit purchased the up and coming personal finance site Mint, it was only a matter of time before Mint lost its freshness and became another stale online business. What I didn’t know was that the transformation would begin so quickly. Let’s be honest, trying to up-sell a “free credit report” is one more bad decision away from urging folks to yank out their gold teeth and send them to Cash4Gold. Or, even better, to Cats4Gold.

It just sounds desperate, doesn’t it? I mean, if this is what Intuit brings to the table, why did it even bother? Seriously.

As we talked about yesterday, News Corp, perhaps trying to prove that it can do something even dumber than buying MySpace, is thinking about yanking its books out of the Google card catalog. Microsoft, trying to put the world back in order after a rare PR success with the launch of Windows 7, seems to be willing to pay News Corp to do so. Someone up in that cloud of arrogance and wealth has to know this won’t work. Which means that they are really just using consumers as fodder in a jealousy-induced feud with Google. No thanks. I’ll pass.

Elsewhere, the web is littered with the corpses of abandoned projects and services that were acquired by big companies, only to die on the balance sheet. Over and over, ideas are hatched, nurtured until some bigger fish takes the bait, sold. . . and die. Leaving all the users that created all that alleged value out in the cold.

There seem to be a couple of repeating patterns.

One, someone creates a service that is some combination of really cool or really hyped. Lots of traffic results, and some big company with lots of money gets fooled (again) into thinking all those eyeballs can be monetized. The big company buys the cool/hyped service, tries without success to stuff the free-formed service into a dollar-sized hole, and ends up shuttering it or selling it at a huge discount.

Two, companies realize that they can’t beat the competition on the field by creating and promoting a good product, so they conspire to change the rules. This is kindergarten politics, engaged in by the super-rich, at the expense of the rest of us. Yep, it’s the man getting one over on us. Again.

Even so, none of this is good for the purchasing company. Certainly, none of this is good for the consumer, who gets dragged all over the place and then abandoned. The only ones making any money on these deals are the serial service creators and the early investors who invest a little money in order to get a big chunk of the purchase price. Numbers being what they are, a few hits can finance a lot of misses. And, again, consumers get taken for a ride.

At the end of the day, I don’t see how this does anything other than discourage innovation. With everything being based on either ads, which no one likes, or getting bought by Google, which is becoming more and more of a long shot, there is little incentive to try to create the sort of value that people would- hold your ears- pay for. When did paying for value become so out of fashion?

Or is it that many of these services aren’t as value-producing as some would have us believe?

One thing is for sure- if the developers don’t believe in their product enough to charge for it, then why should users believe in it? This is the root of the problem, because lots of people would happily pay for a good, reliable service that isn’t likely to disappear or get sold to a big, clueless mega-company.

Want an example?

I pay for a premium account at Remember the Milk, solely because it integrates so well with Gmail and Google Calendar.

I would gladly pay for Disqus comments, if they could make the “Reactions” feature work reliably (it doesn’t presently).

There are plenty of others.

We just need to figure out how to make good ideas and big business compatible.

Screwing Over Users Is Not a Business Plan

Let’s all say it together: the way to make money on the internet is not to screw over your users.

Once more: if you have to make things worse for users in order to make money, maybe your business plan sucks.

First, I read a little more about this ad.ly thing. How in the wide world of sports can any portion of the legitimate internet embrace, applaud or permit what looks to me like nothing more than organized, high tech spam? Seriously, if I am going to un-follow someone for tossing another idiotic multi-level marketing scheme in my Twitter feed, why in the world would I accept blatant ads from people? Legitimize an in-Tweet ad-based economy within Twitter and you will be overrun by a horde of eyeball prospectors whose sole or substantial objective is to entice eyeballs inside their tent in the name of money. If the philosophy isn’t enough to make you say “hell no,” then spend about one second considering the impossible logistics. Twitter can’t keep the spammers off the line now. Imagine how bad it will get if in-Tweet ads gets blessed by Twitter. You’ll see a ton of automated links to stuff we’ve already seen, purely as a set-up for the ad-hosting, money seeking Tweet. Spam may kill Twitter as things stand now. Why make it easier?

If you still aren’t convinced, then remember that Tweets are short, 140 character posts, most of which are either completely un-newsworthy or link to content elsewhere. If you want to pay people for Tweets, then you better pay them for links. And recommendations. And good karma. Word of mouth is the benefit of a good product, not the product itself. If I tell my friends to watch a particular TV show, I don’t expect to get paid for it. And if I did, the value of my suggestion would be nil.

In sum, this in-Tweet ad business may just be the worst idea ever. Other than this one.

Microsoft has proven that it can’t get its ducks in the same zip code where the internet is concerned. So rather than create something that gets the herd to migrate voluntarily, it is apparently considering trying to buy the herd via some thankfully doomed from the start deal with News Corp, the other big company that doesn’t get the internet. Here’s the thing: people are going to use Google, that’s why it’s a verb. If you take your content out of the Google search results, people won’t see it. Merchants go where the people are, not the other way around.

And if you pay someone else to take their content out of those search results, I, for one, will consciously avoid whatever corral you’re trying to force me into. That’s just not OK. If you want eyeballs, create something people want to see, and make it easy for them to find it. There’s way too much internet content supply to artificially manipulate the demand. So don’t try to gain customers by making things harder. It won’t work.

The things that make money are the ones that are good for users. Not unnecessary obstacles that only serve to leverage off of them.

Mountain Lion Hunting: Who’s the [Kitty] Here?

Let’s start with a few facts. I’m from the rural south. I love to hunt, mostly birds, and I eat what I kill. In fact, I don’t duck hunt much because I don’t like the way ducks taste. I shoot skeet or sporting clays every chance I get. I drive a pickup truck. I have a beard, etc. So even though I’d probably disagree with the typical good ol’ boy on a lot of social and political issues, I’ve been mistaken for a good ol’ boy more than a few times. I am not some animal rights extremist. I have crapped all over PETA here and on Twitter for years for being so absurdly extremist that it has completely lost the power to convince.

Oh, and one last fact: the next to last fistfight I got in was after I called some guy a [synonym for kitty] for going to Africa and shooting lions and elephants and whatnot. It was a long time ago after a few beers and one too many great white hunter story. I proved to be a little tougher adversary than some oblivious lion a hundred or so yards away.

So, while I generally identify with the hunter/camper/outdoorsman culture, I draw a very bright line between those animals that are OK to hunt and those that are not. Dove, ducks and deer are one one side of that line. Lions, elephants and bears are on the other. So it really bummed me out today when I saw some dude on a hunting blog I read proudly retelling how some other dudes killed a mountain lion in central Texas. If I saw a mountain lion that wasn’t about to eat me or my family, I would be really excited. Honored, actually. What I wouldn’t be is inclined to shoot it.

I understand the argument that mountain lions adversely affect the deer population. Well, guess what- so do humans, and I imagine there are a lot more humans out there killing deer than there are mountain lions. I love deer meat and eat it all the time, but I certainly wouldn’t kill a mountain lion just to ensure a few more pounds of deer sausage in my refrigerator. And let’s not overlook the fact that the only reason most of these folks want to keep the deer from being killed by a mountain lion is so they can kill them themselves.

I have heard- and rejected- the argument that mountain lions are dangerous. The fact is that mountain lion attacks are rare. Dogs kill far more people annually than mountain lions do in a century.

And I understand, even if I don’t completely believe, the argument that the mountain lion population is growing, with the decline of pesticides and goat and sheep farming. What I also understand is that in Texas mountain lions are not classified as a game animal, which means anyone can kill as many of them as they can find, any time and without limit. That’s messed up. There are only 30,000 mountain lions in the western United States. There are 30 million deer in the United States, with deer population control becoming a major concern in numerous states. So I’m not buying the argument that there aren’t enough deer to feed a few mountain lions.

So unless there is evidence that this mountain lion was an immediate danger to persons or expensive property and could not be trapped and relocated despite diligent attempts to do so, those dudes should have let that cat go.

If you are interested in learning about mountain lions- as opposed to just killing them, here’s an informative article on their population, age distribution and mortality rates.

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Open Office

open office

Everybody’s talking about the office suite for the next decade. Microsoft Office 2010 is in beta. Google is waging a vaporware offensive, trying to convince people that it is about to engage in some much needed alchemy with Google Docs. Meanwhile, Open Office just plugs along. Being just as free as Google Docs, and, at least, just about as good as the ever-bloating Microsoft Office suite.

I’m all about free, and I live in the cloud. There are free and cloudy apps for just about everything. But the choices for word processing applications are slim, which is odd given that today’s computers are the offspring of yesterday’s typewriters. But fear not. Here’s the bottom line on office suites, with an emphasis on word processors.

Google Docs

I have moved my email and calendaring activity to Google Apps, via the standard (e.g., free) version. With Better Gmail 2, Gmail is a great, free and accessible email application. Google Calendar is far superior to the calendar in Microsoft Outlook. On the other hand, Google Docs, Google’s word processing app, is- to be kind- not ready for prime time. Sure, it’s fine for a light home user who wants to write a letter every now and then. But to try to use it for business purposes is to submit yourself to a digital hell. Among the multitude of problems: no tracked changes feature, which is an absolute must for business users; and formatting chaos when you upload a formatted Word document. In sum, it’s a non-starter. Google wants us to believe that this will all change. In the meantime, though, we have work to do.

Microsoft Office

Microsoft has a deep and valuable franchise in the corporate world. One that became a virtual, if not actual, monopoly when WordPerfect committed suicide at the hands of Novell and Corel. IT managers know Word. More importantly, secretaries and administrative personnel know Word. To monkey around with the status quo on the corporate desktop is to move a whole lot of cheese. In sum, inefficiency and rebellion would result.

Nevertheless, Microsoft is trying to open the door for a competitor. No one- and I mean no one- in a corporate office wants the menu structure he or she has used for years to be replaced by some confusing ribbon or whatnot. As Microsoft continues to force old dogs to learn new tricks, the remote odds of meaningful corporate word processing competition get less remote. The name of the game in 2010 will be simple and easy. Not bloated and complicated.

All of which favors the other alternatives.

In fact, for purely home users, I can’t think of a single reason to pay for Microsoft Office. Fortunately for Microsoft, however, most home users require the ability to open, read and edit work-related documents from time to time. Documents that were almost certainly created in Microsoft Word. I certainly do, and that has complicated my effort to go completely free and cloudy for word processing.

Open Office

So I find myself uninterested in paying for Microsoft Office and unwilling to put myself through the agony of using Google Docs as my exclusive word processing app. Until recently, Open Office was sort of like Bigfoot. I’d heard of it. Maybe I’d seen a purported picture or two, but I was still a little scared of it. Recently, however, my dilemma caused me to read up a little more on it. Then I took a deep breath, downloaded it, and gave it a spin.

And was pretty impressed.

It feels like a slightly stripped down version of Microsoft Word. It opens Word documents without destroying them. There is a way to show and review document revisions. Shoot, it saves documents in Word format. There’s even a plug-in that lets me open from and save to Google Docs.

All the votes aren’t in yet, but I’m about ready to call Open Office a winner.

The Face(book) is Familiar

I’ve spent lots of blog space and podcast time pooping all over Facebook. Saying how it is for kids, that it’s AOL 2.0, that it’s the internet kiddie pool. I was right, and I was wrong. Mostly wrong.

Facebook is all of those things, of course, but perhaps in an evolutionary- and not a pejorative- way. More than anything else, Facebook is like Brawndo: it’s got what people crave. Over time I have mostly capitulated to Facebook, simply because it’s the only path to a lot of people I want to interact with. I create almost all of my content out here on the big, scary web, but I push a lot of it into Facebook. And I visit Facebook several times a week to see what all the non-nerds are talking about. Granted, there’s a lot of talking over each other, but there’s a little interaction. Which is more than you can say for Twitter.

With all that, I started to wonder just what makes Facebook so popular.

It’s partly the ready-made platform to connect with other people. It’s partly momentum. It’s partly that MySpace sucks so completely.

But mostly I think it’s the names. You know, those things beside the users’ photographs. One thing Facebook got totally right is the absence of anonymity. Anonymity is like cars- it brings out the inner asshole in people. It has killed before, and given the chance would do so again.

Anonymity, with a helping hand from Google, killed newsgroups. Those of us who have been on the internet long enough to remember when news readers were for reading Usenet posts, as opposed to RSS feeds, miss the days of the old-school newsgroup. It was all kinds of good, until anonymous assholes and spammers killed it. I haven’t read a Usenet newsgroup in years, and don’t even have a news(group) reader on my computer.

Then came the message boards. For a decade or so, message boards proudly carried the banner of online interactivity. The combination of better technology and community moderation generally kept the spam under control. But a large population of anonymous users first diluted the perceived content value of message board sites to the point that advertisers stopped buying ads, and ultimately destroyed the entire message board culture, via bad information, bad behavior and general mayhem. All of which could be doled out at will without fear of reprisal because of anonymity. Sissies grow giant stones behind the safety of a windshield or a message board handle. It’s gotten so bad that I don’t even frequent the message board sites I founded. Rather, I create Google alerts or FriendFeed pages for topics I’m interested in. It’s not as fun as the old message board days, but it’s better than watching a revolving group of anonymous jerks litter my screen with nonsense.

Meanwhile, over at Facebook, people are sharing information under their real names. Sure, you can create a fake identity and set up a Facebook account, but users who are prudent with their Friends lists can easily avoid most screen clutter. You generally know who you are talking to. With a name comes accountability, and there is a direct correlation between accountability and behavior. All of which creates a better experience for the users. Which draws more users and, in turn, more advertisers. Ultimately you have digital high tide that raises all ships.

Which is why I ended up with the rest of the world on Facebook. Even if I still find it vaguely embarrassing.

Delaney’s Swim Meet

Delaney has been a competitive swimmer for most of her 8 years. Currently, she swims for Rice Aquatics. She had a swim meet today at the University of Houston. She swam the individual medley, the freestyle and the backstroke, and did great.

Here are her IM and freestyle swims.

She ran out of gas a little at the end of the IM, but she still had a great time. She swam a beautiful freestyle.