I had plans this weekend and Twitter led me astray from them briefly, but I discovered a new cover of an old favorite in the process.

It all started when I woke up on Saturday morning, checked in with Twitter, and noticed that Cody had twittered: “Departing to Kansas for the weekend. If Magnetic Fields changed song lyrics to ‘Baby I was born on a PLANE’ it would apply to my recent life.” I absolutely love Magnetic Fields, and “Born on a Train” (available on iTunes) is one of my favorites, so Cody’s twitter had me puttering around the house on Saturday morning singing this amazing song:

Some roads are only seen at night
Ghost roads — nothing but neon signs.
But some nights the neon gas gets free
and turns into walking dead like me

And I’ve been making promises I know I’ll never keep
One of these days I’m gonna leave you in your sleep
I’ll have to go when the whistle blows, the whistle knows my name
Baby, I was born on a train.

Feeling inspired, I sat down to play the song (I learned to play it on guitar long ago — it’s easy, like most Magnetic Fields songs), but I couldn’t remember past the first verse, so I did a search and near the top of the results was a link to the Arcade Fire lyrics. Arcade Fire?! I had no idea.

Now, I’m not totally sold on this whole Arcade Fire thing (that’s another post entirely), but when a band covers one of my favorite Magnetic Fields songs, it goes a long way towards earning my musical respect. I had to find their cover, and it only took a search or two to locate it. It was a live version done on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Electic on January 17, 2005. You can watch the whole performance (“Born on a Train” begins at the 29:40 mark — open this URL directly in RealPlayer instead of the built-in player if you want to see the time) or you can go straight to it on YouTube.

In the process of finding the Arcade Fire cover, I discovered a video of the Magnetic Fields’ original version, and a fan write-up that compares the original and the cover head-to-head. I’ll still go with the original, but I’ll give a nod to the Arcade Fire for good taste, and a nod to the Internet for giving me the chance to make the comparison.

[Update: Wired posted something after I had started writing this that suggested that Pat McGovern’s hand wasn’t quite so invisible after all. Harry McCracken “returned to [PC World] only because IDG founder and chairman Pat McGovern and IDG President Bob Carrigan both assured him that he would have editorial autonomy over the content.”]

As a former employee of IDG, I have been closely (but quietly) following the PC World controversy in which editor-in-chief Harry McCracken reportedly quit when CEO Colin Crawford tried to kill a story that was critical of Apple (see Wired’s Epicenter blog):

The piece, a whimsical article titled “Ten Things We Hate About Apple,” was still in draft form when Crawford killed it. McCracken said no way and walked after Crawford refused to compromise. Apparently Crawford also told editors that product reviews in the magazine were too critical of vendors, especially ones who advertise in the magazine, and that they had to start being nicer to advertisers.

Fast forward to today, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the story “Editor in Chief Harry McCracken Returns to PCW“:

In a surprise announcement, Robert Carrigan, president of IDG Communications, told PC World’s staff today that “Harry McCracken has decided to remain with PC World as vice-president, editor in chief.”

“[CEO] Colin Crawford will be rejoining the IDG management team as executive vice president, online. In this role, he will be responsible for driving IDG’s online strategy and initiatives in support of our Web-centric business focus,” Carrigan said. “We will conduct a search for a new CEO to lead PC World and Macworld.”

This is welcome news for Journalism (yes, with a capital ‘J’), and I’m not that surprised based on my experience at IDG. Bob Carrigan was quoted, but in this outcome, I see the quietly steady yet invisible hand of Pat McGovern, the visionary behind IDG. When I worked for IDG as CTO of InfoWorld from 2001-2005, I spent enough time around Pat in regular board meetings, dinners, and company functions to get a real sense of how Pat operates. Pat is an amazing man (he is, incidentally, quite wealthy — #85 on the Forbes wealthiest people in America list in 2006, according to Wikipedia, he donated $350 million to MIT to start the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and he understands the China market as well as any American businessman, having been one of the early businessmen there in 1980). In his official bio, one segment sticks out and rings completely true for me in my dealings with Pat :

“Acting locally” describes McGovern’s commitment to his people and to a decentralized management structure focused on respect for IDG employees and customers. In April 2004, Inc. magazine named McGovern one of its “25 Entrepreneurs We Love” for “knowing the power of respect.”

“His commitment to decentralization has created a constellation of motivated business units that make their own decisions about everything from how to reward staff to what new businesses to launch. He also treats his end customers — the readers of such publications as Computerworld, PC World and Macworld — with consummate respect. At IDG the quality of content is sacrosanct…”

When I was at InfoWorld, we went through a vicious downturn in which advertising revenues dropped by almost 50% year-over-year, and as a member of the executive team, I went to the 3-times-a-year board meetings where Pat was always present. I can’t recall specific dates, but I do remember Pat suggesting on a number of occasions that our coverage needed to be more critical of vendors. As a shrewd businessman, Pat was always focused on sales numbers, but he also seemed genuinely interested in what we were doing editorially and wanted us to tell it like it is. He knew that the success of his business depended on editorial credibility. In these meetings, out of all the people in the room, Pat was always most engaged (not like some Blackberry-obsessive execs these days) and even in tough times, Pat was constructive and respectful. I’m not the suit-and-tie type, but when Pat came to town, I happily wore a suit and tie out of respect, and I didn’t mind at all.

Although I moved on from IDG two years ago, I consider Pat McGovern a personal and business role model. In a world where some people equate business success with slash-and-burn management, I’ve grown to admire Pat’s ways even more. Business cycles come and go, but empowerment, respect, and setting a strong example go a long way in building a long-term legacy. I don’t know the inside scoop of what happened at PC World, but you can bet that Pat McGovern was in the mix, empowering people like Bob Carrigan to make the right decision in the end. In the news cycle, this might seem like a flash-in-the-pan story about journalism, but for me, it’s a story about respect and good business in the long term. Hats off to IDG and Pat McGovern.

More from around the web:

• Gizmodo: “PC World Editor Harry McCracken Returns Victorious“
• The Unofficial Apple Weblog: “McCracken returns as PC World editor in chief“
• Ryan Block: “McCracken is backen“: it’s a big win for him and PC World, but a far bigger win for the collective of writers, editors, and publishers who fight daily to keep their editorial independent.
• Business 2.0’s Apple 2.0: “Palace coup at PC World“
• Scoble: “PC World does the right thing and other stories“
• Rex Hammock: “As the (PC) World turns“: When you read stuff like this from former employees, you know there’s something special about the organization and the individuals who run it.
• Paul Conley: “All’s well that ends well“

Back in November of 2004, I was walking down the streets of Manhattan when I saw the biggest blue screen I had ever seen in Times Square, so I recorded the moment with a blog post and a photo on my old InfoWorld blog. Back when I was at InfoWorld, this blog post would show up pretty high in the page view reports on a regular basis — it had serious staying power.

Now it has re-appeared in this “Top 12 blue screens” post, in Portuguese no less. I’m in 3rd place all-time, with this comment:

Um belo Bluescreen em 3 planos diferentes!!

Babel Fish tells me that this means something along the lines of “a Bluescreen beauty in 3 different plans!!”

This is the kind of recognition I crave.

Update: My friend Jon Williams sets the translation straight in the comments: My Brazilian Ops Director translated, its “A nice Bluescreen with 3 different angles”

After one of the busiest six-month periods of my life, I’m back to a little bit of home geeking. I’m on the verge of getting serious about massive storage for home and my research suggests that the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ is the NAS (network-attached storage) device of choice among geeks. You can buy the box pre-configured, or you can buy your own drives and do it yourself (amazing that you can get 750GB drives now!) I was a little concerned that a company that I’ve never heard of wouldn’t be around if things go bad, but then I read that Netgear is buying Infrant, so that worry goes away.

Here are a couple of reviews I’ve already found:

Barry’s Rigs and Reviews — exhaustive (perhaps even exhausting) but near-insane number of photos of everything about the device, including the ethernet cable that comes in the box! Every admin/setup screen for the software, too.

Club Overclocker (good photos of the device and screenshots of the admin and setup screens)

Anyone out there got any opinions?

(For those with some time on their hands, there’s the open source route with FreeNAS, but for me, it’s all about plug-and-play these days.)

In these most excellent days of wall-to-wall college basketball (you can take the boy out of North Carolina, but. . . ), conversation in my immediate social circle tends to revolve around hoops. Unfortunately, I have friends who really don’t care all that much about the road to the Final Four, and that causes some undue friction. They just don’t understand the magic — the thrill of watching a field of 64 get whittled down to 16 in a weekend, then down to 4 in another, and then in the climactic Final Four, down to that “one shining moment” (a song that is, objectively, the corniest schlock ever written, but somehow the lyrics “it’s more than a contest / it’s more than a race” do ring true).

Fortunately, I found a book that can bridge the gap between those who love hoops and those who don’t: The Enlightened Bracketlogist: The Final Four of Everything. Yes, everything — so, on page 88, you’ll find a bracket of 64 talk show hosts, divided up into “regionals” (late-night, morning, daytime, and hard-news), with first-round matchups like Johnny Carson vs. Dick Cavett, Conan O’Brien vs. Jon Stewart, and Larry King vs. Charlie Rose. For each bracket, an expert plays out the field an offers commentary on the matchups and the winners chosen to advance. In the talk show host bracket, the expert is Bill Carter, the TV industry correspondent for the New York Times. Mo Rocca does the “Political Hot Buttons” bracket.

Other brackets include “Rednecks” (matching up the likes of Britney Spears, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Bocephus), “Sins Against the Language” (dangling modifiers, spellcheck errors, semicolon abuse), “Alt-country songs” (championship matchup of Whiskeytown’s “Angels are Messengers from God” vs. Lucinda Williams’ “Changed the Locks”), “Conspiracy Theories” (lunar landings faked vs. Kennedys killed Marilyn Monroe in the first round!), and “Political Hot Buttons” (Final Four: gay marriage, gun control, abortion, border security). There are literally 100 brackets guaranteed to keep your non-basketball-watching friends and loved ones busy while you get your hoops on — go buy this today.

Enjoy March Madness!

(thanks to my Raleigh homeboy David Menconi for the heads up on this excellent book)

“Beer: The Best Beverage in the World” — as lectures go, that seems like a pretty good draw. I’ll let you read the description of the talk itself (which does look quite interesting), but I love the speaker’s bio: Charlie Bamforth, Ph.D., D.Sc. is Chair of the Department of Food Science & Technology and Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Malting & Brewing Sciences at the University of California, Davis.

There are lots of “students” of “malting & brewing sciences” on college campuses today, so I’m guessing Dr. Bamforth is a pretty popular professor on campus.

When I read a review in The New Yorker that said “The Sarah Silverman Program” is “much the meanest sitcom in years — and one of the funniest,” I knew I had to tune in. Reading further, when I noticed that Brian Posehn plays one of Sarah’s “red-bearded gay neighbors,” well, I was pretty much sitting by the Tivo waiting for the little red light to pop on. Then, when I finally tuned in and Zach Galifianakis came on screen, I knew I was in for a treat (if these names don’t ring a bell, then check out The Comedians of Comedy, one of the funniest comedy films I’ve ever seen — the best way I can think of to describe it is crude comedy for geeks and comic book nerds with unnatural music obsessions, and the people they love.)

The episode I watched is described as follows:

Sarah takes in a homeless man to prove that she’s a caring person. Brian learns karate, but fails to use it at critical moments.

The running gag in the show isn’t called out in the synopsis, but it’s about as crass as it gets. Best of all, Brian does use his karate at one critical moment, in an inspired fight scene with Zach Galifianakis that surely ranks as the best ever between nerdy comics (maybe the only one). Here are some screenshots — check out Brian catching some air:

  

So, “The Sarah Silverman Program” is highly-recommended. If it feels a little too crass for your high-brow tastes, remember that you can always fall back on The New Yorker review to justify your indulgence. Prepare to be embarrassed by your own laughter.

I have a prior commitment that night, but for you Brian Posehn and Comedians of Comedy fans in the Bay Area, there’s a show on Sunday, March 4 as part of the Noise Pop festival.

Back in December, I wrote about Kiva.org and microcredit, a concept that drove last year’s Nobel Peace Prize award. Kiva.org allows anyone to make microloans to enterpreneurs in the developing world.

Read my last post on Kiva.org for details on the loans I made, but I just wanted to note that I got my first repayment notices earlier this month from both people to whom I made a loan. The email explained a little more about how the repayments work:

This repayment will be divided amongst all the lenders who helped to fund this business, depending upon the percentage each lender contributed. Note that you cannot actually withdraw or reloan these funds until after the loan term is complete.

The loan term is as long as 18 months for both of my loans, and the payments are coming in on time and for the appropriate amounts. I’ll continue the updates over the next several months — this is both fascinating and uplifting.

The folks over at FTD blew it for me this Valentines Day. They managed to charge my credit card, but the flowers never showed. Nancy and I had a good laugh about it and wondered how such a mishap might affect a shakier relationship. I’m considering calling FTD and telling them that their mistake has me sleeping in the garage and fending off costly divorce proceedings. Just for fun.

In the end, the FTD fiasco meant very little and we enjoyed a great dinner at Town Hall in SF. . . but FTD, you still suck!

Update: when it comes to cataloging FTD suckitude, the blogosphere delivers.

Update 2 (02/16/07): FTD is trying to kiss and make up — but what, no flowers?

Dear      Valued Customer [nothing warms me up like an oddly-spaced generic greeting! – CD]

We regret to inform you that we were unable to fulfill your order for delivery on Feb 14.
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused and we will be issuing a full refund of all charges made to your credit card as a result of your order.

In response to this issue, by clicking through the following link [link redacted] you will be entitled to receive $15.00 off on all orders placed with FTD.com through May, 30, 2007.

Once again, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.

FTD.COM.
Customer Service

When Tim O’Reilly calls a product “a milestone in the history of the internet,” something really, really cool is happening. Here’s what the coolness is all about:

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

Yahoo! Pipes was built by Pasha Sadri, Ed Ho, Jonathan Trevor, Kevin Cheng, and Daniel Raffel. I work in the row of cubes right beside the team and it’s been inspiring to watch Pipes go from idea to reality (I was lucky enough to work closely with Ed and Jonathan last year when we released the Checkmates prototype at eTech).

Jeremy nails the big picture as usual, so I’ll just point to a mashup that I built. The most exciting thing is that I didn’t really have to know how any of the APIs worked that I used — they are rolled into the product and all I have to do is feed data into the mix from my choice of RSS feeds, set up the pipeline with various parameters, and the data I want transforms and flows out of the other end like magic.

Here’s basically what is happening behind the scenes. I took the Upcoming.org RSS feeds for the Fillmore and the Warfield in San Francisco (two music venues) and joined them into one feed, then piped the unified feed through the Content Analysis Term Extraction API to pull out the keywords in the RSS feeds. Then I looped through the Flickr API to run queries for photos on those keywords. My logic wasn’t perfect, but all I know is that I saw a photo of George Clinton and sure enough, he’s playing at the Fillmore on March 9. It’s 1:20 am as I write this, and although I have been meaning to go to bed for about three hours now, I’ve just been having too much fun reconfiguring these pipes. Yes, fun.

A big congratulations to the team and Bradley and Caterina for carving out the space for the team to do their magic. This is a proud moment for Yahoo!