His lovely wife, Anna, started a business selling attractive reusable bags. Mitch was helping Anna cover a booth at the fair. Anna’s idea for the product and company came two years ago when she saw a need to design a resuable bag that pretty and strong.  EnvBags was born. It’s a great bag and we use it all the time.

It’s always fun to see a family business in action. Good luck, Anna and Mitch.

Do I miss the paper? Yes. I love the seeing the news well layed out.  I like the editor designing the pages so I can easily see what they think is worth reading.  I love the serendipity of finding good stories that I may not have clicked on in the browser.  I love the act of folding the paper over. I even like the ads better.

But then, I do not like the fact that I’ve already read half of the top stories the previous night. I don’t like the idea that someone drove in his car to throw ink drawn on dead trees wrapped in plastic on my driveway. And I don’t think the cost of the paper subscription is worth the marginal value of the paper experience.

If my experience is not uncommon, then the print paper goes away and we need to see a business model that works for the local paper. Finding a new business model is not the subject but I suspect a combination of prominent and useful local ads and inserts (I still want to see if what’s selling locally), high-value ads based on a local specialty with national appeal (say tech for the SJ Mercury News) and premium content subscription may be the answer.  Fleshing that out will have to wait until another morning.

UPDATE: Original video is no longer available. Here’s a substitute one that’s not as good but still gets the point across.

Found through my friend Ian Kennedy

I grew up in NYC and I always find myself drawn to movies where the City goes down.  I still have to watch Cloverfield but I think I got the other recent ones covered.

No link to Amazon here since Max would want you to run down to your local bookseller and buy it there.

I’ve accidentally seen all the major Olympics results before I could watch it.

Click to see a bigger version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

But more importantly, nytimes.com takes advantage of being on the web by doing much more than just repurpose text and images. The site includes a ton of video, audio, slideshows and applications that are very informative and/or helpful. Here are a few of many standouts:

While I watch CNN for their analysis and their cool touchscreen maps, I come to the New York Times for their Delegate Maps. The county-by-county information is updated as quickly for the readers as it is for their own editors. It’s very cool.

Their audio and visual slideshows can be a lot of fun. Their writers are not always the most dynamic personalities but the audio certainly adds a good perspective.

This is a fun and simple application to see the Top Surnames in the US. The information design is terrific (larger fonts denote higher rank). My surname doesn’t make the Top 5,000 but my wife’s is in the Top 500.

This is another example of an information application that the New York Times has done well. This is an application to help you figure out if you are better off renting or buying. Depending on when you bought your house, you will be either like or hate its findings.

The New York Times spent several months with updates on Life After Katrina. The stories are nicely displayed here on this map.

And when the New York Times started publishing blogs of their own, I found them immediately useful.

Now, not all is perfect with the New York Times. In fact, they have probably my biggest pet peeve on the Web. If you click into a story off the front page and then double-click on any word or phrase, a pop-up window will appear that shows a “reference search” for that word or phrase. Now, I am a “clicker” by habit; I will just click on a web page for no reason whatsoever. On the nytimes web site, that means I am poppping up useless windows left and right. This is a bad attempt, or should I say dirty trick, on generating pageviews with ads.

But other than that (huge) nit, I find myself spending more time on the New York Times web site than ever before. Nicely done.

I got my boy a gmail account when he was born so I sent a note to it today.  [My first note: My son sent his alarm for 5:30a so he could make mom breakfast in bed on her birthday.  Of course, the alarm wasn't waking him up so mom turned it off for him, thinking it was a mistake.  When he woke up, he was distraught because he had missed his opportunity to get mom her breakfast.  It took my wife a few minutes to get him to articulate the problem.  When mom figured it out, it was a heart-warming moment.]

Anyway, I love this “daddyhack.”  Now if I can only remember to use it…

Danica Patrick became the first woman to win an IndyCar race.  This is a terrific milestone for the sport.  Adding to that is this terrific pose by first place Patrick with second place Helio Castroneves (a two-time Indianapolis 500 winner).

As a young bachelor dude living off take-out food, I raised my hand and expressed confusion about why anyone would care about such features. Price was what counted, I confidently declared. SOOOO quickly, I was taken out back and shot. Many in the room jumped on me and expressed that they cared deeply about the features of the dish-washing detergent. The professor used me as the prime example of the trap of thinking YOU are the customer.

Almost everyone who designs products and starts companies fall into the trap of designing with your own emotions and needs in mind. Even after my highly-public b-school fail, I fall into the trap. But dammit, unless you are Steve Jobs (who has the rare skill of knowing what the customer wants), stop it!