The world’s food system is highly stressed. And it’s unhealthy for people. And cruel to livestock. Over the holidays while on vacation with my family I read Michael Pollan’s incredible book An Ominivore’s Dilemma. It was incredibly informative and inspiring. The general thesis is that human beings in the 21st century have lost track of our food chain - we really don’t know what we’re eating most of the time. Where does it come from, who produces it, who processes it, at what cost?

It being the holidays, the subject of food was on my mind when it came time to formulate my 2008 resolutions. I’d never seriously confronted the idea of vegetarianism before. Lots of friends and family members are vegetarians, but seriously? In the words of Vincent Vega “Yeah, but pork chops taste good. And bacon tastes good“. I’m a foodie. Some of my favorite places and things are…. meaty. Making the leap all the way to vegetarianism just wasn’t realistic.

But I did want to do something. So I came up with 2 things that I thought could be personally meaningful.

1. Give up fast food. Pretty easy - sort of a no-brainer. Those places are really bad on so many levels. Hasn’t been hard.
2. Practice vegetarianism on Mondays.

I haven’t told too many people about the second one, and when I do, the usual reaction is nervous laughter. Like I’ve just told a not too funny joke that doesn’t really make sense. In fact for the first few months I didn’t really tell anyone - even Jen - probably because I thought it was somewhat nonsensical myself. My semi-coherent rationalization(s):

• If everyone in the US cut out 1/7 of their meat consumption, the environmental and societal impact would be radical.
• I’d probably enjoy the foodie challenge of learning to cook meatless.
• Most importantly, what I was searching for was a way to make a lifestyle change. Not to change the world, but to change my own personal behavior. Sometimes that requires baby steps.

After 4.5 months of keeping these resolutions, I have to report that I’m really, really, happy with the results. The biggest unintended consequence of the Monday plan is that I eat way less meat now every day of the week. Fewer meals contain meat, and the portions I eat are smaller. I crossed some psychological barrier I didn’t even know was there - every meal doesn’t have to have meat as a focus. Another outcome is that I have become a lot more curious about the provenance of the meat I do eat. Researching the food chain, buying the $15 chicken at the farmer’s market instead of the $5 Purdue broiler. Now the goat-cheese guy sells eggs and ducks too, not produced ag-biz style. And Candido the butcher is getting pasture-raised beeves from the Central Valley and calling me to see if he can put anything aside for me. It costs more, but I eat less. Changing the lifestyle.

Maybe “Meatless Monday” isn’t right for you. But read the books and articles, and find a realistic change. See where it takes you.

photo from Flickr by phitar

Posted: May 15th, 2008 under food.
Comments: 1

I’m really disappointed that I didn’t have this idea first. The blog not martha has some step by step directions for making salad bowls out of bacon. I am doing this for sure next chance I get.

Posted: February 28th, 2008 under food.
Comments: 1

ABC announces that they are introducing a video-on-demand service that doesn’t let you skip commercials. I’ll be about the millionth person to pile on, but this is such an amazingly bad idea I can’t help myself. “As we developed this at every stage, there was an agreement that however we put this together, disabling the fast-forward function was key.” As my friend Adrian used to say “That’s a stupid comment, and you’re a stupid person for making it”. Why don’t you build a better car by disabling the gas pedal?

Some of the comments refresh the tired old “pile on the music industry” meme, but this is sooo much worse. Its 2008. We know how this movie ends.

If you haven’t seen it yet Chris Anderson (author of the seminal “Long Tail” theory) wrote an excellent article about how “free” works on (and off) the Internet. There isn’t anything terribly groundbreaking in the article, but it’s really well written. Maybe someone at ABC will read it before they embarrass themselves like it’s an all-night naked karaoke session.

Update: Read/WriteWeb has an excellent rebuttal to the Freemium article. Good points all. Musicmatch was one of the greatest “freemium” product of all time in terms of cash flow conversions, but the model wasn’t a good match for Internet scale when we tried to port it to Yahoo! One of the reasons that “unlimited mail” storage works at Yahoo and Google is that most people can’t use a lot of that storage - it doesn’t have a lot of utility to have tons of files in mail. I’m interested to see how the “media locker” product evolves over the next 5 years. There is no doubt that either Yahoo, Google, Amazon, or some well funded third party (or all of the above) will offer unlimited free media storage in the next 5 years with a decent player interface. That will put the freemium model to the test.

Another interesting development will be all these tech companies going carbon neutral via offsets, increasing the marginal cost of networked computing. I’d love to see what that cost of storage curve is projected to look like with the offset costs overlayed.

Posted: February 26th, 2008 under digital entertainment, digital music.
Comments: none

I bought an Apple TV on a spur of the moment as a Christmas present for my wife (lame, it was really for me). I had never really given the product much thought before, I bought it primarily to be able to access the huge number of mp3s I have on hard drives in my house from the living room. We live in a relatively small place, I really only need to send music to 1 set of speakers with 1 control panel so I didn’t need to do much thinking. When purchasing the Apple TV (I got the $300 version with the smaller 40G hard drive), I sort of felt like I was overpaying for a box/functionality that if I did some research I’d be able to get much cheaper.

But I knew (instinctively, that the Apple solution would look good, minimize cables, and work with my iMac and home network out of the box. So I said screw it and shelled out.

Damn what a great brand they have. There are all kinds of case studies you do in business school about brand marketing, but my experience with Apple in the last year basically tells you all you need to know about brand marketing. Oh and don’t forget the engineers and product people, because the whole experience has delivered.

After this latest free software upgrade here is what I can do with my 6 button remote.

• Access all the music/photos/video on my iMac and any external drive connected to it
• Browse iTunes and purchase music
• Browse iTunes and purchase or rent movies and TV shows
• listen to or watch free podcasts
• Youtube
• Flickr

I can’t power the thing off, oddly enough, which I don’t get.

But there isn’t much more internet functionality I really want on the TV. I’d love to add some tweaks on the margins and I’m sure new stuff is coming, but for really anything else (ie. requiring a keyboard or mouse) I can grab my phone or laptop or sidle up to the desktop. A year ago I was hoping Apple didn’t get the internet, now it’s obvious they really get it.

I’ve been working on the fringes of the Interactive TV space since I went to an international conference on the subject in the fall of 2000. eNow/Relegence founder and product genius Edo Segal had the web 2.0 server-side xml/rss syndicated feed model down before just about anyone else and I was over there looking for distribution opportunities for our content indexing tools. WAY too early of course, thank god my Amsterdam boondoggle was the limit to our investment in interactive TV at that time. Of course at Musicmatch and then Yahoo I had lots of meetings and numerous deals with hardware companies, software companies, MSOs, and retailers about digital home products and concepts. It would be scary if I actually listed them all out. I even helped launch and market a few. The “digital home” space is a lot like mobile on a smaller scale: there have been a lot of entrants, a lot of ideas, a lot of money spent bringing failed products to market. Big corporations with vested interests in yesterday’s cash cows creating walled gardens, copyright issues muddying the waters, competing standards, etc. Meh.

So where are we in 2008 on the digitl home front? There are basically 3 products that can be considered really good in the market: Tivo, Sonos, and Apple TV. And Apple TV is by far the best (I think - I don’t have a Sonos or a Tivo anymore, but I know people that do). Not to flog a dead horse as Ned Martin would say, but notice none of the products were brought to market by cable companies, satellite companies, non-Apple PC companies, MSFT (although Xbox 360 deserves honorable mention even though they have lost close to $30B on it), Intel, telecom companies, etc. My DirecTV DVR sucks, but I had no choice if I wanted dual tuners which is the killer app. And I have no hope that it’ll ever improve to the Apple TV level.

These 3 products have a few things in common

• They set out trying to tackle specific problem (time shifted TV integrated with personalization and guide; synchronous or asynchronous streaming music in every room of your house, getting the content from your computer onto your TV/stereo) and avoided extra features that added complexity.
• They were willing to lose money at the beginning (and for a while) as the market filled in
• They charge a premium for the device, making sure it has a feature-set rich enough for early adopters, and avoid the temptation to compete downmarket with undercutting products.

Generally this is is the model that worked so well for Apple with the iPod. Focus on making the hardware excellent (interoperable, reliable, easy to set up). Don’t aim for the mass market at first. The last point is the interesting one IMO, because it goes against what we are taught usually happens in consumer electronics and PC businesses. Calculators, walkmans, boomboxes, CD players, HD TVs - they all started diving in price almost immediately upon release.

Of course, Apple needs to open up Apple TV at some point - same problem they have with iPhone. Let me add cool 3rd party apps. And I’m not buying any content with DRM on it (ill happily rent DRM’d content though). But they definitely nailed it with this upgrade.

Posted: February 16th, 2008 under digital entertainment, digital music, internet radio, portable devices.
Comments: none

SxSW ‘07, which is when Twitter became a thing by my reckoning, was a year ago next month. Why does Twitter still suck? From a technology standpoint, correct me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t “do” much except route small packets of info around the internet. Not like they need to buy gazillions of servers to keep up with demand etc. The technology is a lot simpler than even the eNow/Relegence technology we developed back in ‘99/’00. Why do a noticeable portion of my twitters not make it to the few places I want them to go? Why is the twitter.com down (seemingly) all the time? The Twitter blog is complaining about abuse, but come on we all deal with it.  I have definitely noticed that the number of people following my feed isnt growing anywhere near as fast as my Facebook network.

I’m definitely a fan of the concept and hope they figure out a way to improve, not getting bought too early etc.

Posted: February 13th, 2008 under social networking.
Comments: none

Steve Smith in Sullivan Canyon, originally uploaded by steveray.

The mountain biking in Santa Monica has been off the hook with all this rain we’re having. I’ve ridden Sullivan Canyon 4 or 5 times this year, its always a different ride because the stream keeps jumping its banks. You need to ford the stream at least a dozen times coming down, sometimes riding in the stream itself for extended periods. I caught this shot with my iPhone camera. About 40 minutes later I broke the screen trying to switch the music without stopping. Grrr.

Posted: February 11th, 2008 under moblog, mountain biking, portable devices.
Comments: 1

I blogged about the Facebook ads targeting the Yahoo employee network a few months back. It turns out that the VC behind the ads has put up round two to see if the continued uncertainty at Yahoo is helping his CTR. It is. He’s also targeting MSFT employees.

Yahoo’s employee base has a higher number of entrepreneurial types I’d guess, since a larger percentage of the employees came aboard via acquisition.

My own unscientific research gleaned from talking to my friends at Yahoo! - the ads were definitely noticed.

I always said during my tenure at Yahoo! that is MSFT did finally acquire them, during the resulting bureaucratic confusion I would simply stop coming to work and see how long I could keep getting a paycheck a la Office Space. My over/under would be 12 months.

Posted: February 8th, 2008 under social networking, work.
Comments: none

While the twins were eating a turkey and corn bread stuffing scramble for breakfast, I was reading a very thoughtful editorial in the LA Times by Ezra Klein. The gist is that we are social beings, so people make us happy, but we’re also competitive beings, which explains why we work so hard for “stuff” to keep score. As I have reflect on a very satisfying year of my life over the holiday, Klein’s article provides a framework for explaining my strong feelings of happiness and well being. I’ve been able, somewhat unwittingly, to channel my competitive nature and value my social nature.

Work - output not politics: Last summer in the first of what would become a seemingly endless cycle of re-orgs at Yahoo!, I was given a lateral when I could have been promoted. They did give me a big raise and a title bump but it was one of those “we’re afraid you might leave” promotions. Had I been focused solely on the politics of the situation I might have done something rash like jump to another company or another division in Yahoo. What I did was put my head down and re-commit to doing what I was good at. Eight months later I had closed the biggest deal of my life and by force of will launched the Sansa Connect. It was a great product and arguably the best press Yahoo! got in 2007, even though the product was not a financial success. But when I reflect on the whole affair though, the best part of the process was working so closely with some of Yahoo’s best people: Dave Goldberg, Ian Rogers, Roberto Fisher, Suman Nichani, Dave Mowrey, Mike Cowan, and literally dozens more. Focusing on being effective at my job, not the politics of my job, led to great satisfaction because of the connections I made while being the leader of a team.

Work - remember what makes you happy: Towards the middle of the year when the re-org machine at Yahoo was in full swing, I found myself once again at the short end of the internal politics stick, spending more time trying to justify my existence than actually doing anything meaningful. I was being told to stay positive and that a VP title would be coming in the fall, but it was pretty obvious that nobody knew anything and the only thing certain was more uncertainty. Yuck. After my first meeting with Evan Rifkin, CEO of Flux, I knew my days at Yahoo! were coming to an end. I was a matrixed BD guy in a company that had no clear strategic direction - I wasn’t part of a team. When I talked to Evan I remembered my time at Musicmatch and Relegence and even Yahoo! Music - working closely with other great people as part of a team with a common goal. Even though working in a small cutting edge tech company can be extremely unsettling and nerve wracking, I take great satisfaction in working on a tight team, and I hate spinning wheels and playing big company politics. It was hard to leave the numerous good friends I made at Yahoo, especially my team, but now I have a new team and we’re making it happen.

Social tools help, despite being silly: I adopted two pieces of technology in the past year that have greatly enhanced my social nature: Twitter and Facebook. Facebook has very few real practical or professional applications, Twitter almost none. But both tools allow me to keep tabs on my friends and co-workers and provide updates about my day-to-day in a way that is consistently pleasant. My friend Mike Manning was so anti-twitter at first that he registered the domain ihatewitter.com. But now he’s traveling around the world and it seems like blogging is too much effort, but his twitterroll has been great fun to follow. Its interesting to note that neither of these tools are very competitive. Whereas not everyone feels comfortable blogging, anybody can twitter effectively. My friend Patrick Barry sends about 1 twitter a month, and its still worth it. And I stay away from the dumb f8 apps that have you rating people’s looks etc. I can only hope that my friends and family who are a bit older and less tech-savvy will adopt Facebook and Twitter in the coming year.

Embrace Urban life: One great decision Jen and I have made is to live and work in Santa Monica. I don’t understand why people decide to commute in from the Valley or Redondo so they can have a bigger house or a yard or other trappings of “success”. I ride my bike to work, dropping the boys off on the way. Jen often walks to her job. Sure, we rent a small house with a tiny yard, but we convert 10 or so hours a week from sit in the car alone time to family time. How much is that worth? Walking to the park and farmers market on the weekend sure beats driving to the local big box supermarket, too.

Working Out - teamwork without competition: My two main physical pursuits these days are mountain biking and yoga. Mountain biking is social - I go with the same small group every weekend. But the guys are all super laid back so we aren’t hung up on who is in better shape or who has the best bike. We just bullshit and sweat. Yoga is interesting because its a compelling competitive sport, but you don’t keep score. With the right instructor, every yoga workout is about pushing your body and mind to its limits in the context of a roomful of similarly challenged souls. The ethos of yoga is non-competitive while being very social.

So thanks to you Mr. Klein. I’ll try to remember to forget about titles and other meaningless competitive measuring sticks, and stay focused on friends, family, and keeping touch with my fellow man.

Posted: November 25th, 2007 under mountain biking, social networking, work.
Comments: 2

LA’s best pizza

Originally uploaded by steveray.

Is Joe’s - it opened last week, a transplant from Greenwich Village.  Far and away the best pizza I have had outside of NY or Chicago.  We are eating it like crazy here cause its on the next block.  We are seriously concerned about our long term health and weight  prospects.  This photo is the buttery cheesy garlicy white pizza.  I just hammered 2 pieces and I’m eyeing another.

Posted: November 20th, 2007 under food, work.
Comments: 1

Thanksgiving school performance

Originally uploaded by steveray.

They knew all the words

Steve

Posted: November 20th, 2007 under Uncategorized, moblog.
Comments: none