EverythingSteve.com

San Carlos, California USED to be Known as 'The City of Good Living'

But the killjoys at the police department are seeing fit to bury that reputation once and for all. That said, we're drowning in nail salons, so hats off to Sgt. Robbins and the gang for shutting at least one of them down. Now if we could only get a Peet's Coffee. Finally, lest you think I was a customer, my wife will gladly attest that my feet have never heard the term "pedicure."

3/30/2009

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PRESS RELEASE #033009

Prostitution Business Shut Down
Suspect Arrested for Prostitution & Possession of Cocaine

Contact :
Mark Robbins, Police Sergeant, Police Department   
(650) 802-4234
mrobbins@cityofsancarlos.org

On March 30, 2009, San Carlos Police concluded a prostitution investigation by arresting Jenny Tran, age 49, of San Jose, for prostitution and possession of cocaine.

The arrest was made at Tran's place of employment, Jessica Paris Professional Nail Care, located at 1575 Laurel St, after San Carlos Police received information that massages were being offered at the nail salon, a violation of their use permit. 

An undercover officer entered the business as part of the investigation and was offered a sex act in exchange for money. 

Tran was arrested for prostitution, and was then found to be in possession of a significant amount of cocaine. 

Tran was booked into the San Mateo County Jail and is currently being held on $10,000 bail.     

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The EverythingSteve.com Small Company Seal of Approval, Chapter I

There are a few small companies out there pumping out products or services that I admire. And I like the way they're marketing themselves as well. Simple, low budget activities based on the passions of their underpaid executives and far more underpaid marketing leaders. I'll be writing about a few of my favorites, completely randomly, during the next several weeks-months-whatever. You might want to take note of this first company.

Yuck yuck yuck. It's called Evernote! And this Mountain View-based company recently celebrated its first anniversary. Now, if you're like me, you like to take notes -- a lot of notes. You fill up notebook after notebook. But then what? Oh, and how do you archive and find old notes? More importantly, how do you find the proverbial needle in the haystack? Sure, you can use Microsoft Word or Google Docs to store your notes. Many people do. The latter offering is cool because you can add your pals to a document and enter in notes in real time. A group of us did this during an operations meeting several months ago. It was quite hip. OK, that could be pushing it.

And Microsoft OneNote has been around for awhile. OneNote is specialized software for taking notes. It also stores photos, audio files, handwritten stuff, etc. It stores your information in a more natural and intuitive way than word processing software files. And the search functionality is powerful. But at the end of the day, OneNote, as great as it is (and don't underestimate this product), is essentially client-based software.

Evernote gives you the best of both worlds. Windows client? Yes. Mac client? Yes. But this app. also lives just fine on the Web with an intuitive and powerful Web UI. All Evernote notes files are securely stored "in zee cloud" on whatever hosted storage planet they're leasing. Now, here's where it gets interesting. Windows Mobile client? Yes. iPhone client? Yes. Blackberry client? Nope, but it's apparently the number one complaint of users and they're actively working on it. So basically you can take notes from just about anywhere or capture those random but simply brilliant thoughts that could make you famous for curing world hunger, store them in "notebooks," and tag them for easy retrieval.

And you can take photos on your mobile phone and easily upload them to Evernote.

You can record a brief audio snippet on your cell phone and upload it to Evernote. (Press "Play" for a sample, below.)

Evernote also provides "Web Clipper" bookmarklets for easily clipping and uploading partial or complete Web pages (with URLs) for subsequent retrieval. Sure, simple bookmarks are OK, and I'm a huge Diigo fan. But there is some power in having an immediate visual record of just what it was you were looking at that captivated you so much. In the words of CEO Phil Libin, Evernote wants to be "your external brain" that records and archives all the things you want it to so you can "remember everything" for "for the rest of your life." I'm not so sure about how much I trust that last phrase, but at this point I'm giving Evernote the benefit of the doubt, not to mention my notes! Oh, they've also opened up their platform and work with a slowly growing number of partners. So for example, you can buy a new-hickie WIFI SD card for your digital camera from a company called Eye-Fi and beam the photos you just shot right into your Evernote account.

But the thing I like the most about Evernote is, for lack of a better term, its corporate persona...its BRAND persona. The blog is cool, at least for Evernote fans and fanatics--lots of updates, tips and tricks. They recently posted a podcast featuring the CEO, head of marketing, and some engineering type--most likely the head of engineering. In the school of "why say something in 10 minutes when we can say it in 35 minutes," that's just what they did. And it turned a few people off. I, on the other hand, who typically have the attention span of a gerbil, enjoyed the banter replete with 'only in Silicon Valley' odd and dry humor. For example we get to learn that the CEO is a former FoxPro programmer and a slob who has to take pictures of his hotel room doors to remember where he is staying when he travels. And we also learn that the head of marketing is a green machine who takes public transportation to a fault. And so on.

They also pump out a monthly newsletter, have a Facebook fan page, an active Twitter feed, etc. None of these in this day and age are such a big deal. But their content is authentic. It shows passion for their offerings, and a legitimate interest in their customer/fan base. Incidentally, Evernote is free for the basic version, which recently began displaying small ads. A beefed up version with much more storage and improved security and peformance costs about 5 bucks per month. Most people opt for the free version, so goodness knows how these folks will make money or be viable long term without getting acquired. I care not because I like these guys, their product, and the way they project themselves. Yes folks, Evernote.com gets the EverythingSteve.com Small Company Seal of Approval. If I get ambitious I'll design a logo for my next award recipient. But American Idol is on in a few minutes and I need to proof this sucker and add in the links, so....later!

I Think Dwight Is Really Onto Something Big Here

Click here, and then click "Home" on top of the page once you've finished watching Rainn Wilson's video, and have a look around. It's cool.

R.I.P. Ron Silver

One of my favorite actors--I'll miss him.

Have You Done Gone and Diddit Yet?

I have to admit that at first glance the "You are what you do" tagline, and the photo of a young hottie with nine percent body fat surfing on the home page of new social networking site diddit.com was not appealing to me at all. But Diddit is an extremely cool, and yes, addictive concept that encompasses many definitions of "doing it," from the aforementioned mountain treks to eating at a freakin' iHOP or even...ahem...watching "Lost in Space." I'm curious to learn more about this site and share it with you. I've only spent an hour or so on it so far but as would be expected given the smart and cerebral minds running the company, there appears to be a lot of depth in terms of what one can do, share, and learn here. By sharing, I mean that the site provides ample opportunities to share the anecdotes...the "stories" behind what you did, meaning it really is more than a site for checking off accomplishments and quests. And the UI is slick and relatively easy to use, particularly given that at this point diddit.com is labeled as an "Alpha" offering. Three random suggestions:

1) One easy way to acquaint oneself with the site is to browse categories of activities. This is easily findable right from the top menu on the first page. There are a number of cool and all-encompassing categories like "Food & Drink" and "Geek Culture." But in this dificult economic environment a category I was looking for was 'charity' or 'contribution' or 'volunteering.' There are smatterings of volunteering activities on the site under the non-intuitive category of "Everyday Life." So here's a vote to create an individual category that encompasses contribution. We are the change, baby! (Incidentally, do you have any spare change?)

2) When conducting a search for an activity, if one finds it in the search results listed as an "Activity," I'd like to see the ability to check off that I did it or want to do it right from that top-level list without having to click down a level.

3) In terms of editing information like addresses and phone numbers for activities or venues, here is a subtlety. On one hand, how does Diddit make fields like "Address" editable, which it largely does? On the other hand, how do you prevent folks from arbitrarily entering incorrect information? I noticed the phone number field isn't editable, yet for Pacific Athletic Club in fabulous Redwood City, California, the number provided was for "Catering" versus the main number. And there APPEARED to be no way for me to change that.

These are minor quibbles. Overall, it's a cool service. I don't want to curse the biz, but I think this is gonna be big...Check it out. Incidentally, I'm on the road for the next several days. So enjoy the break. I know I will.

Buy Buy Buy!

It's time to go a bit commercial, and for me to make a few pennies off of....YOU. I like this Amazon.com MP3 widget to your right. For one, I've been buying my MP3s off of Amazon for some time. They've always been DRM-free, which is admittedly no longer as big a deal now that iTunes offers the same thing. But Jeff Bezos is a nicer guy than Steve Jobs, don't you think? And if you press the right arrow, just to the right of the 'Play' button, you can quickly toggle through the last 10 MP3s I've purchased from Amazon.

Be like me! Listen to the music I listen to. Buy buy buy!

"Lady Writes the Blues"

If you've got about 13 minutes to kill, here is audio journalism at its best (click the "Listen Now" link toward the top of the page).

A little more than a week ago, NPR's "All Things Considered" aired a biography of Rose McCoy, one of the leading -- yet virtually unknown -- songwriters of the 50s and early 60s. The cottage-like songwriting industry as Ms. McCoy worked in it ultimately died, giving way to singer songwriters and bands who wrote their own songs.

This is a fascinating glimpse into the roots of popular music.

Are You The Smartest Person in the Room?

No offense, but if you're hanging with either Jeff Bezos of Amazon or Marissa Mayer of Google, the answer is most likely "no." Both of these folks have been on Charlie Rose's TV program in the last few weeks, and the interviews were compelling and thought provoking. Sure, they both have unsettling laughs, engage in a requisite level of company hype, and in the case of Ms. Mayer, have questionable fashion sense. But these are bright bright bright people -- and for me, are a pleasure to listen to.

Click here for Jeff Bezos Interview

Click here for Marissa Mayer Interview

And Continuing Yesterday's Topic...

OK, perhaps I went too far. Maybe there are still some redeeming, even-handed perspectives one can find in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal. For example, this is a pretty fair point of view:

In one of his disturbing spells of passivity, President Obama decided not to fight Congress and live up to his own no-earmark pledge from the campaign...He’s been lecturing us on the need to prune away frills while the economy fizzles. He was slated to make a speech on “wasteful spending” on Wednesday...Team Obama sounds hollow, chanting that “the status quo is not acceptable,” even while conceding that the president is accepting the status quo by signing a budget festooned with pork. Obama spinners insist it was “a leftover budget.” But Iraq was leftover, too, and the president’s trying to end that. This is the first pork-filled budget from a new president who promised to go through the budget “line by line” and cut pork.

Wow. A bit harsh, but arguably fair. Now, I know I played this reindeer game a few weeks ago, and I won't do it ever again, but one more time, this appeared in today's New York Times and not the Wall Street Journal. By the way, when you say New York Times, you need to use that annoying redneck accent intoned in the old Pace Salsa TV commercials...as in NEW YORK CITY??? But it gets even better. Which columnist from the Times wrote this stuff? Click here. Thass right...O.M. freakin' G!

So what's my point? It's that I'm seeing the Times call it as individual columnists see it, while I see the Journal call it as Rupert sees it. The Times has an ombudsman. The Journal doesn't. Now in ordinary times I'd say the two papers are apples and oranges. One is a stellar business daily and the other a stellar general purpose newspaper. But these are clearly not ordinary times and one has to wonder who the hell wants to read a business daily right about now anyway. I used to dismiss the Times. I was wrong. Now I'm dismissing the Journal. I hope I'm proven wrong but don't believe the forcing function exists that will make me wrong.

The Rupertization of the Wall Street Journal is Nearly Complete

I've been shuddering during the last few months to see repeated op-ed pieces from Karl Rove in the Journal. A few weeks ago I shuttered anew when I saw an op-ed piece from Rush Limbaugh. It seems to me that in the past one would not see Republican mouthpieces but intelligent and balanced commentators on the editorial pages.

And it seems to me that in the editorials themselves one would not see ignorant slandering. But this appears to have changed, as many long-term Journal readers expected it would, given the track record of other Murdoch-owned publications. For example, Last Summer I saw an editorial that, at the time, blamed the rapidly falling stock market on the FUTURE planned policies of Barack Obama. The thinking went that Obama was beginning to lead in the polls and so the market was heading south because of concern over the prospects should he win the election. Fairly illogical, in my opinion.

And today I read the following snippet in the editorial section in a piece called The Obama Economy:

As 2009 opened, three weeks before Barack Obama took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 9034 on January 2, its highest level since the autumn panic. Yesterday the Dow fell another 4.24% to 6763, for an overall decline of 25% in two months and to its lowest level since 1997. The dismaying message here is that President Obama's policies have become part of the economy's problem.

Americans have welcomed the Obama era in the same spirit of hope the President campaigned on. But after five weeks in office, it's become clear that Mr. Obama's policies are slowing, if not stopping, what would otherwise be the normal process of economic recovery. From punishing business to squandering scarce national public resources, Team Obama is creating more uncertainty and less confidence -- and thus a longer period of recession or subpar growth.

So now we're blaming a guy who has been in office for five weeks for the stock market ills. His popularity continues to soar, and yet he is cited as "creating more uncertainty and less confidence." Hogwash! What about the tens of billions of additional dollars being thrown AIG's way? What about auto sales that continue to plummet? Home prices that continue to plummet? Bank fundamentals that continue to deteriorate?

Has Obama been putting his best foot forward these past five weeks? I don't think so. And the Journal is certainly entitled to disagree with the President's policies, including the stimulus package just passed. There are many intelligent arguments for doing so. But this ignorant, slandering style of editorial writing is frustrating. I used to expect more and we used to get a whole lot more from this paper. We used to get intelligence...an intelligent perspective that, even if we didn't agree with it, would be sound.

I'm disappointed. I used to regard the Journal as perhaps the single intelligent voice espousing a conservative (some would say moderate) perspective. This intelligence is waning. Thanks alot, Bancroft family. You really screwed this one up.