Earlier in the decade, Mark Prior was the big pitching phenom.  He was a star at USC,  was drafted at the top of the draft by the Chicago Cubs, and was in the major leagues in 2003, within a year or so of being drafted.  His name could have been changed to “Can’t Miss”.  Problem was, his arm did not agree with all the pundits.  By 2006 he was out of baseball after numerous arm surgeries, unfortunate injuries, and a fateful collision with a guy named Bartman.

It is easy, because it has been so long since he has pitched in a major league game, to forget how exceptional Prior was. He was hailed as a once-in-a-generation pitcher at Southern California, with an unheard-of 17-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio and seemingly flawless mechanics. The small-market Minnesota Twins, perhaps scared off by Prior’s price, chose a hometown product, Joe Mauer, with the top pick in the 2001 draft and lavished him with a $5.15 million signing bonus, a record. About six weeks later, the Cubs, who chose Prior second, gave him $10.5 million.

Today, Prior is attempting to make his comeback to the majors by playing in a semi-pro league out in his hometown of San Diego.

I bring all of this up because on Friday, today’s phenom of the year Stephen Strasburg is scheduled to have “Tommy John” surgery on his once golden right arm that has taken MLB by storm this year. And I do mean “taken by storm”. The well deserved hype surrounding Strasburg was off the charts in today’s 24/7 online media world. Like Mark Prior, Strasburg has (or now, had?) all the natural gifts and tools to be special. But with this injury, the hyped up sports world has to again ask “what if” with this newest athlete of the moment. Will he fall on the phenom scrap heap along with David Clyde, Joe Charboneau, and Brien Taylor? Or will he come back and continue (in 2012) on the amazing trajectory he has been on this year?

Destiny is an evil bitch sometimes.

Via RWW

Here is my video using my childhood home in Boston as the address.  NOTE: Be sure to only have this browser open.  Its a very processor intensive app and video.

I can’t believe someone actually pays for studies like this.  A recent study in England has found…wait for it….almost 90% of users of DVR/TV time shifting devices skip the ads in the shows they have recorded.  It really took a market research study by Deloitte to figure this out?  Stunning!! A revelation of market research!!  In the same story, the respondents did say that if the “ad pods” were shorter, they would consider paying more attention to the advertising. As noted earlier this week, some advertisers are grappling with this situation by trying to fake out viewers by having their ads look so much like the show that they are watching that they will stop Fast Forwarding through the ads.

The exhibition, set for October, will showcase videos from as many as 20 finalists of YouTube Play, a contest for graphic artists and users of Googles GOOG video site. A celebrity jury that includes Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami and The Wrestler director Darren Aronofsky will wade through about 200 videos whittled down from thousands submitted in July.

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It would be really cool to recreate the street bending scene from Paris using Lego.

Via Amusing Planet

Nationals Park – Home of the Washington Nationals

Camden Yards – Home of the Baltimore Orioles

Fenway Park – Home of the Boston Red Sox

I am not sure how I failed to play Doom during the last 17 years. While I have long been primarily a console gamer, I dabbled with PC gaming before, during and after Doom’s launch. I had a Commodore 64, a PC that ran games off DOS and, later, Windows 3.11. I had friends who loved playing Marathon, which they described as Doom for their Macs. But somehow I never played Doom. Maybe it was too gritty for me. I was one of those kids who collected Superman comics, not Batman, and never Wolverine.

Via Slashdot

Its about time! Gmail finally improves its Contact area. It just got pushed to my Gmail and I have to say its far better than what they used to have there.

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via mashable.com

In the 1890s the Philadelphia dry goods magnate John Wanamaker, who had taken over the old A. T. Stewart store on Broadway and Eighth Street, acquired the southerly five houses of Colonnade Row. In 1902, or perhaps 1903, he demolished his properties.

Two decades later, Delbarton, the country house of the banker Luther Kountze in Morristown, N.J., came to be owned by a Benedictine monastery, St. Mary’s Abbey, which also operates the Delbarton School.

Generations of students wandered into the woods for nonacademic purposes, encountering a mysterious group of tumbled Corinthian capitals, column drums, wreaths and cornices that came to be known as the Lost City.

The archivist of Delbarton was always curious about these ruins in the forest behind the school, and it was a recent and amazingly simple Google search that solved the mystery.

In a chance encounter with a garden designer, Marta McDowell of Chatham, N.J., Father Benet mentioned his continuing quest. Within a day or two, he recalls, she had typed into Google the search string “wanamaker Corinthian demolition,” raising a March 2008 article in Period Homes magazine by the classical architect Thomas Gordon Smith on the surviving houses of Colonnade Row — with images that match exactly the pieces of Delbarton’s Lost City. Bingo.

As it happens Mr. Smith, a professor of architecture at the University of Notre Dame, has for years been studying Colonnade Row, making measured drawings of the surviving houses and interiors. He used them as an inspiration in designing the 2007 Classical Galleries in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When he learned of the Delbarton trove, he was in Morristown in a week, like an Egyptologist who has found out that there is another chamber in King Tut’s Tomb.

Doing a simple search on Google today yields a Flickr Photo Set from May of this year that also connects these dots, so while this mystery is profiled in the NY Times today, it’s really been in the public domain for about 4 months now.

Old Colonnade Row Photo courtesy Curator of Shit

Max was really an actor wearing prosthetics, and that illusion epitomizes the television-mad future in the show. The series, to be released on DVD by Shout! Factory, follows Network 23’s star reporter, Edison Carter (Matt Frewer, who also played Max), through a corporate-ruled wasteland where new technology beget new forms of abuse. The show, datelined “20 minutes into the future,” stirs together future-shock speculation with contemporary influences: roving live broadcasts, cyberpunk, MTV, camera-ready Reagan-like artifice, television evangelism, video art and the thousand-channel universe.

A video of a reporter who visits an amazing full size house made completely out of Lego.
Via Holy Kaw!

Spongebob going over the ground rules with the Umpires at a Somerset Patriots game. :-P

A photo set from Alan Light on Flickr from a a private party thrown for Barbara Streisand after the premier of A Star is Born in December 1976. All the photos are taken with a Polaroid.

A decades-old insight from a study of traditional social networks illuminates one of the most important aspects of today’s online social networking. In 1973, sociologist Mark Granovetter showed how the loose acquaintances, or “weak ties”, in our social network punch far above their weight in their influence over our behavior and choices (American Journal of Sociology, vol 78, p 1360). Granovetter found that a significant percentage of people get their jobs as a result of information provided by a weak tie. Subsequent studies have revealed that weak ties benefit our health and happiness. Granovetter suggested that this is because these friends-of-friends aren’t like you, yet they are likely to be similar enough in social outlook and personal interests to have a positive influence.

The most interesting element for me is how everyone’s ever expanding social network will prompt people to go to their network first for information, references, advice, support, and referrals. This is one of the main reasons why Google is so concerned about the ever and rapid influence of Facebook as a “go to” source of information over Google’s search engine.

All these social networks are a sociologist’s wet dream!

in a perfect storm of bad luck for CBS, that’s just what happened when Annie was evicted about 10 minutes after she was first revealed to be the Saboteur.

So now the show’s producers need to figure out another twist or catchy scenario to keep things fresh.  I say they put Julie Chen in the house for a few weeks.  That would be an interesting twist!

A team of creatives, tech geeks, marketers and writers gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon yesterday and produced 87 short comedic YouTube videos about Old Spice. In real time. They leveraged Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. They dared to touch the wild beasts of 4chan and they lived to tell the tale. Even 4chan loved it. Everybody loved it; those videos and 74 more made so far today have now been viewed more than 4 million times and counting. The team worked for 11 hours yesterday to make 87 short videos, that’s just over 7 minutes per video, not accounting for any breaks taken.

Marshall Kirkpatrick over at RWW has a nice write up on the shoot, and calls out what I think is the most important element of this campaign: that the brand team at Old Spice had the courage to trust the Weiden + Kennedy team and give them the freedom they needed to crush it.

The Yankees’ lineup for Sheppard’s first game on April 17, 1951, included DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Johnny Mize, Yogi Berra, and Phil Rizzuto. And the opponents that day, the Boston Red Sox, were led by Ted Williams.

Speaking to the BBC, Finland’s communication minister Suvi Linden explained the thinking behind the legislation: “We considered the role of the internet in Finns everyday life. Internet services are no longer just for entertainment.”

That’s it…I’m moving!

First, a study in 2002 took two sets of people, one more tipsy than the other. When they put the same photographs of people of the opposite sex in front of both groups, the tipsy people rated the pictures 25% more attractive than the sober ones. This effect can be rooted to the following:

The effect can reportedly be traced to the nucleus accumbens. When you’re looking at another human being, the nucleus accumbens is the area of the brain that decides how attractive that human being’s face is….As it turns out, alcohol, all by itself, stimulates the nucleus accumbens. So when you’ve have a few drinks, and you look at a face you may have judged as unattractive when you were sober, your brain, under the influence of alcohol, tells you that this face is in fact somewhat attractive. And the increase in perceived attractive seems to be directly proportional to the amount of alcohol consumed.

But this is my favorite. The article above goes on to say that n 2005, a study was conducted where scientists actually came up with a mathematical formula to calculate the state of “goggliness” that people are in, factoring in how brightly lit the area is, the eye sight quality, the amount of smoke in the air, and the distance between the two people, with the end result being your “beer goggle score”.

I’m thinking the next generation of Mobile Simplicity’s application needs to include a widget that incorporates this formula. There has to be a drinking game here.

Criminal complaints filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Monday read like an old-fashioned cold war thriller: Spies swapping identical orange bags as they brushed past each other in a train station stairway. An identity borrowed from a dead Canadian, forged passports, messages sent by shortwave burst transmission or in invisible ink. A money cache buried for years in a field in upstate New York.

They even had the sexy redheaded siren.

Stories like this just fascinate me. The way the covert operations from CIA and FBI go about identifying these rings and understanding the signals that the spies use to communicate is just so cool. Makes you want to channel your inner Austin Millbarge and Emmit Fitz-Hume

I was looking through some photos this evening and realized I did not share this one, which is one of my favorites taken when up in Vermont back in early May. This is a nice photo of the Robert Frost House with the red barn in the foreground.

Via Designboom

Some awesome photos of the first rounds of the World Cup from Boston.com’s “Big Picture”. Clearly, the mobile phone plans in Paraguay offer, er, benefits just not offered by the carriers in the USA.

This does make sense as it reinforces how brands can have a much more open and “conversational” dialogue with customers, wether its to promote a new product or stem the tide of a crisis.

The European Union is backing projects to turn the plentiful sunlight in the Sahara desert into electricity for power-hungry Europe, a scheme it hopes will help meet its target of deriving 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources in 2020.

That would be Africa hot.

In a related story, more oil is leaking in the Gulf of Mexico. @bpglobalpr #bpcares

Someone handed the former President a soda. He put his arm around Donovan. He sought out coach Bob Bradley. The party went on. Clinton wound up just hanging out for 45 minutes; some think he would’ve stayed hours longer if, you know, the guys didn’t have to actually get dressed.

With these visits to these two MLB stadiums, I took a few pictures, including stitching together a series of photos of each of the stadiums to create panoramics of each one. So here they are. Click on the images to view larger versions.

Nationals Park – Home of the Washington Nationals

Camden Yards – Home of the Baltimore Orioles

On the eve of the 2010 World Cup, an amazing collection of infographics about all things having to do with the World Cup – from the ball to the venues to the players. If you need to get a crash course on the World Cup over the next three days, this is a great place to start!.

Via Wildammo

Artist Jan Vormann has traveled the world fixing old and crumbling buildings with Lego bricks. The gallery on the Telegraph’s website includes photos from buildings in NYC as well as Italy and Amsterdam.

A list of several home decorating items for absolute geeks including the above Han Solo frozen in carbon desk (not sure if I’d want him staring up at me every day).  Some other neat items include ASCII decorated shades, pixelated sofas and rugs, and another personal favorite, the waffle iron that makes keyboard shaped waffles.

With the 30th Anniversary of Pac Man just passing by and making everyone feel just a little bit older, and the great fanfare that was given to the event by Google, thought I’d share a fun article from the SF Chronicle highlighting 10 cool Pac-Man Cakes and Treats .  The above cake is just awesome, as are the cookies shaped as Pac Man and the ghosts.

Reality has hit Google again as they finally admitted defeat on trying to sell its Nexus One phone directly from its site and bypassing its wireless carrier partners.

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Bill Simmons, the prolific columnist and podcaster from ESPN, is a fellow displaced native New Englander (he chose sunny Los Angeles while I’m in New Jersey…clearly a better decision but I digress…). So with the Celtics making a deep run in the playoffs this year (how about that win vs LeBron and the Cavs last night!!), and he being 3,000 miles away from Boston, he created a Twitter handle @celticschants where he could communicate to folks attending Celtics game to get some chants started during the game. A creative way to demonstrate his loyalty to the hometown team.

So last night during the Celtics game 6 win, he posted this:

And then, during the actual game, when LeBron went to the free throw line, the crowd started going with the chant to the point where it was audibly heard on the ESPN broadcast. Folks may think this is a big ESPN conspiracy but in reading today’s Daily Dime about the Cavs loss and the implications for the LeBron sweepstakes, I could not help but notice this quip from author Chris Sheridan :

The Celtics fans certainly had their fun letting James know their prediction, chanting “New York Knicks” whenever James stepped to the foul line on a night when his triple-double of 27 points, 19 rebounds and 10 assists was buttressed by his nine turnovers.

Just awesome. A very creative use of Twitter. Look out Dwight Howard and Orlando, the Twitter-verse will be ready and waiting!

A very cool and creative set of photos titled Pencil vs. Camera, where a pencil drawing is superimposed on a real life scene and then the author took a photo, displaying a seamlessly integrated scene of the drawing and the photo. Super cool!

Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That’s the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry. Unless they can turn themselves into an entirely different kind of corporation by 2015 Apple is doomed to the same irrelevance as the rest of the PC industry — interchangable suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligable profit.

There is a massive steel cage death match going on in the tech world between Apple, Google, along with HP (now that it has Palm OS) and Microsoft.  Microsoft’s head is so “in the clouds” they are rapidly becoming the Sears of the technology world and on the fast track to being “Walmarted” by Google.  They won’t know what hit them until its too late (if that has not happened already).  From its very early years Apple has always been one to have tight controls over its ecosystem and we are starting to see Apple’s transformation from a PC maker to a platform developer.  They acquired Lala recently and just today, I received an email from them saying that they will be shutting their doors.  Why shut such a great service?  So Apple can seamlessly integrate it into iTunes, put all your music on the cloud, and turning a desktop app into software as a service that Apple can use to charge a monthly/annual fee.   Take this model and scale it to everything Apple does.  This is where it is going.  With all the rapid changes taking place around media, data, technology and how people consumer information, it will be very interesting to see how this all nets out.  The big wildcard in all of this?  Google and its Android/Chrome OS.

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For the second time, I’m sending back your Ink’d in-ear headphones.

For the second time, they have #failed in the same manner – one of the earbuds stopped working.

On your site and in your customer service correspondence, you imply that your products can withstand “extreme listening”. My listening demands call for me to pull them out of my pocket, plug them into my Droid, put them in my ears, and listen when I commute to my job in NYC. I’ll concede that NYC can be a zoo sometimes, but its not like my usage patterns of your product is anything close to extreme.  With both Ink’d products that I have returned, one of the earbuds on the headphones has failed and I can only hear audio out of the other earbud.  In the first instance, my assessment was that the root cause was a frayed connection of the cable to the jack.  For my most recent instance, I’m really not sure what is happening that is causing the earbud to fail.

I’ll be honest here, I’m a little frustrated with your products, especially being that I’m not doing anything “extreme” when using your headphones. One time I can understand, but two times is troubling.

But wait…there’s more! I was in Best Buy the other day, looking at replacement headphones to purchase.  I happened to overhear two women who were also looking at headphones, where one of them was saying that her current headphones (which were in her hand) had failed.  When I looked down at them, they were distinctively Skullcandy.  I struck up a conversation with them and we compared notes.  The issue she had experienced was exactly what I have experienced, in that the cable connection to the jack had frayed and caused the audio and headphone to fail.

I don’t know if it’s a problem with the Ink’d line or a broader issue with your in-ear headphones, but I would look long and hard at how these are produced and figure out where the defect is.  I wanted to like your products, really I did. But I’ve lost my patience.  And it appears the woman I spoke with in Best Buy did too.

Here is my site done over for Geocities

The library reached out to the company a few months ago about adding Twitter’s content to the national archives, said Matt Raymond, the library’s director of communications. He cited Twitter’s “immense impact on culture and history,” like its use as a vital communications tool by political dissidents in Iran and Barack Obama’s turning to Twitter to declare victory in the 2008 election.

The Puma Shoe company has reinvented the good old shoebox. While they moved away from the standard cardboard shoebox, they did keep the idea of re-usability in place as the new design has a re-usable bag covering the new shoes and a recycled cardboard “structure” that houses the shoes.

By providing structure to a cardboard sheet, the bag uses 65% less cardboard than the standard shoe box, has no laminated printing, no tissue paper, takes up less space and weighs less in shipping, and replaces the plastic retail bag. Puma claims that this new design will save about 8,500 tons of paper, 20 million Mega joules of electricity, 1 million litres of fuel oil, 1 million litres of water and 500,000 litres of diesel.

Wow, rethinking something perceived as so irrelevant as a shoebox can really have a big impact!

Saw this banner at an empty retail space which was once a CompUSA on 6th Ave in NYC.

Brilliant video parody mash up of Jay-Z and Star Wars titled Galactic Empire State of Mind from College Humor. Princess Leia with the braided hair headphones is so on the money.

A man from Highburton, West Yorkshire, Great Britain takes pictures of space and Earth using a helium balloon and a Canon digital camera he purchased on ebay.

He buys weather balloons from a supplier in the United States; pictures from balloon-borne cameras long pre-date the space program. He uses an off-the-shelf GPS locator, which gets signals from U.S. satellites, so he can track the balloon on Google maps. He bought a Canon pocket digital camera (a model discontinued in 2008) and attached a circuit board so that it would take pictures every five minutes.

An amazing collection of super heroes and villains drawn as Mr. Men. I was always partial to Mr. Happy, although Mr. Persnickity was always a good read.

HAPPY ST. PATRICK”S DAY!! Love the logo change over at Google!

I find it ironic that Google assails Apple for creating a “closed” platform when it comes to technology and applications via iPhone/iTunes, yet it is turning around and building just as closed, centralized a platform when it comes to online advertising.