man with tan is no more.

long live the citrus fortress.

nested parentheses

Things are happening that I shan't go into. It occurs to me, though, that an important task in life involves sorting out the forever people from the people you let go. They are all important, and their lives are all equally meaningful and rich and deep. And even the phrase "let go" isn't right nor fair. Those people might remain in your life as well. The best way I can express it is with a math metaphor. I apologize. But it's like nested parentheses in an equation. Inner parens have the smallest context, and are evaluated first, whilst outer parens, well, they wait a little longer but have the widest context. The metaphorical outer parens, they're the keepers, and they'll be with you forever.

I guess I find myself realizing the some of the parens I had thought were more outer might end up being more inner, and vice versa.

Here's a song.

preaching to the converted

The always enlightening Mike Speiser on why it pays to target your messaging at the most dedicated 20% of your customers/audience, rather than trying to speak broadly to everyone. An excerpt:

Another big learning was that, for most companies, the average cost of moving a customer from the second most loyal to the most loyal category was extremely small while the cost of going from a new customer to the most loyal customer was often a money losing proposition. That is, the costs of acquisition exceed lifetime value, on average. Most companies focus on customer acquisition way too much! Even very early stage businesses are best served by having evangelists amongst their early adopters.

If you're in the digital media industry, and aren't reading his blog "Laserlike" regularly, you are a damned fool. I know you're busy, but just this once, close your door, skip the Team Spirit Meeting and read up; it's not often ideas this good come free.

namespace collision

Ugh. So I've known for years that there's another Tony Zito out there, a semi-savory real estate agent from Baton Rouge -- he even beat me to the domain name. But this takes the cake -- this Tony Zito, CEO of Mediaforge, is in my own industry, and is clearly being interviewed far more oftenthan I. I wonder if the era of Google will inspire more people to name their children with unique identifiers, or opt for digital camouflage.

gonna start up the old blogging machine...

I would say "again" but I think it would be a bit disingenuous. I've been having a lot of thoughts lately, some of which would require at least 150 or 160 characters to fully explore, so I figured it was as good a time as any. I'm considering a switch away from blogger.com, though...we'll see.

From A to C

There is an improv principle that dictates that one should strive to make the leap from "A" to "C". Which is to say -- don't just make the first association, from, say, apples to oranges. Rather, one should make the second order associative leap from apples to, say, promiscuity, via Johnny Appleseed.(Johnny Appleseed, a noted lothario, has led many to make the leap to promiscuity...but that is outside the scope of my treatise.)

Today it seems to me that much of life consists of being at A, and imagining C, and yet being at a loss for how to get there. C makes so much sense. It seems inevitable and true. Yet B seems so impossible, so fraught, so disruptive that we become stuck. How do we get there from here, when so much seems to be determined and established? It takes remarkable creativity and courage, more than most are capable of. Our mothers will be upset. Our friends will shake their heads. Our people will be hurt. And no one likes to hurt people, confound friends, or upset mothers. But sometimes you just gotta fuck Johnny Appleseed.

Come on baby shift that log.

Dusted off the olde turntablee and am listening to some Cat Stevens. Vinyl makes everything better. But WTF is "shift that log" supposed to mean? Sounds gross.

Avatar Neville

In the style of the-n.com's avatars, I present something that is probably only funny to me (and AP), Avatar Neville:

Click here for Avatar Neville.

(If you want it to shut the hell up, right click on it and uncheck "play." Mac people can do whatever they do when they're supposed to be right-clicking.)

Jonathan Schwartz should eat a bag of glass.

On a Saturday afternoon, with the sun sliding through the eastern-facing windows, and smell of breakfast still lingering in the air, I often think to myself "why have I listened through the entirety of car talk? How did that happen? Those guys are entertaining to themselves in direct proportion to how much I hate them. And boy do they entertain themselves!" And yet, lazily, I've let their hour pass. And then Jonathan Schwartz comes on. And I think to myself "I sure have a lot of beer bottles lying around. I wish Jonathan Schwartz would come over, and I could put all those beer bottles in a heavy-duty plastic bag and smash a brick against that bag, again and again, until the bag was filled with fine glass shards. Then how wonderful would it be, on this lazy Saturday afternoon, to pour those glass shards down Jonathan Schwartz's throat. And then punch him in the throat." Instead I just turn to WFMU and am happy to get through that episode in my life. But someday, someday my chance will come.

On the other hand, I really like Steven Devlin. He's a great guy. I would never feed him glass.