Justin Halpern wrote an article for the bang-on, ridiculously awesome website Grantland.com. Halpern is the gifted writer behind the Twitter Account Shit My Dad Says. In the article, he tells a priceless tale about misplaced passions and the thorny path they can lead us down. I won't spoil it with a money quote here because the payoff is just too good. Go read it for yourself.

It does beg the question: is our passion for sports teams, in particular, and sports, in general, worth the emotional roller coaster that it puts us on?

I inherited a love and loyalty for the Dallas Cowboys since before I had sports consciousness. My paternal grandfather had season tickets to the Cowboys inaugural season at the Cotton Bowl. I have lasting memories of my maternal grandmother's voice, yelling at the TV on Sunday afternoons in their tiny, south dallas home: "Come on, Cowboys! Go!" Since the invention of DVR, I can count on one hand, how many games I've missed in 8 years (which really isn't saying too much). I have watched a dozen games live in Irving and Arlington. I even sold concession hot dogs at Texas Stadium in the hey-day 90s for our high school band fund raiser. While I'm not an over-the-top Super Fan that you'll find tailgating all day at Cowboys Stadium, boozing it up under a canopy watching the pre-game on satellite feed from a 60" TV blaring from the backend of a Chevy Tahoe, I do consider my love for the Cowboys to be undying, win or lose.

There's something to be said for the collective mood of a city the week after a loss on Sunday. And vice versa. It matters in some way. Jerry Jones shenanigans aside, the region's sports clubs have an emotional impact on the area whether they win or lose. We just can't get around it. The siren's song is just too lovely.

One of my productivity heroes is David Allen. He just revealed that he's a big Atlantic Monthly fan. It's good to know great minds read alike.

I still say that The Atlantic Monthly is one of the smartest, most insightful publications in the English language. They consistently produce quality journalism and bring to light stories that rise above the derivative drivel that infests other periodicals. I also find them to be refreshingly apolitical.

You can do a lot worse than to pick up and read an issue cover-to-cover. It's completely worth the $30 per year subscription for the paper edition. You can read it for free online, as well.

This is an inelegant metaphor but Google+ was the racehorse who entered the race owned by the very wealthy and brilliant owner. That owner was a master in other animal sports (greyhound racing, perhaps) but he had never tried horse-racing. How different could it be? He went out and hired the best trainers and horse experts and horse whisperers. He was feeding it the finest quality foods. He was keeping the horse well-groomed and trained. The owner convinced many of the fans of his other sports properties that he had a real winner, that it didn't matter if he had never tried to compete in this sport (although he did dabble in it once before with a horse named Buzz). He was going to be a champion, too. He was going to take down the Triple Crown winner, FaceBook.

On the day of the race, the owner had a bunch of his friends bet on Plus. He even bought tickets for fans of his other sports that had no interest in horse racing. Plus, stood attentively in his gate, ready for the bell. FaceBook had been here before and all of her fans were accustomed to her winning. She knew what to do. Sure, she had a few flaws in her game but she was working those out. The bell, rings, the gates swing open and FaceBook flies out. Plus just stands there. Then, he starts into a nice trot. His pace is torrid. There's no possible way he'll catch up to FaceBook. Is there? The Plus fans are hopeful. Maybe he'll figure it out and get going and catch up. But, it doesn't happen. Plus will lose. The owner has misjudged this sport. His horse has never raced before. It didn't understand what it takes to be a winner. Sure, it had the training and preparation. But lacked the experience and momentum.

Like I said - inelegant.

The problem that I have with Google+ is that it gets things precisely backwards. I realized that when I wanted to post something, I posted it to a select Circle; to my "Buddies," let's say. Of those buddies, maybe three of them were actually participating on Google+. The other 25-30 had no idea what was going on and they weren't really an audience for whatever I was sharing. Those 25-30 were having a hard enough time figuring out Facebook, let alone be introduced to entirely new social media ecosystem. The Barrier to Entry was just too high for most. Facebook approaches is from the other end: blast everyone with a post by default and, if you want to change who sees what, you can. This is the best social approach. Not the other way around. Half the time, I forgot who was in what circle anyway.

Then, you've got Signal-to-Noise ratio issues which I won't get into here. Suffice it to say that most of the items coming up in my main Newsfeed (Stream) were from famous people I was following that I had little interest in getting a million posts from. No one in my real life, aside from a few, were posting. Lots of noise, no signal. The effect was that I felt like the guy standing on stage, talking to an audience of about four. In this social media world, that's a lonely feeling. What does that say about my ego? I'm not sure...

Finally, Google is flooding the news wire with stories about how many users it has (and gaining) without explaining that those are all PASSIVE users. Basically, if you sign up for Gmail, you get a G+ account. Even if you never use it, they count you as a G+ user. Who cares?

Social Media networks are only as good as the number of people who actually use the damn thing.

As of February 1st, I'm moving my activity back to Facebook. Not that anybody really cares. 

There’s an old adage. Mark Cuban uses it a lot when talking about why you shouldn’t invest the stock market. It goes like this: In any given situation where you have an investment at stake, take a look at all the players in the room. If you can’t find the sucker, you’re it! Basically, you have to have an edge in today’s volatile markets if you expect any kind of real return (or to avoid serious losses!). By edge, I mean some kind of inside information that tips you off as to which way the chips will fall.

I don’t have this edge. Vegas has had this figured out for years. It’s precisely why I don’t gamble and why Warren Buffett has long advocated that the small investor (that’s you and me) forgo “playing the stock market” on individual company stocks and simply put our money into cheap index funds. We just don’t have the time to find the edge.

Better to not play at all than to be the sucker in the room.

I play an internet game called the Hollywood Stock Exchange. It emulates the real stock market and contains many of the investment vehicles that you might find in real life (e.g. – Movie Stocks, Star Bonds, Opening Week Derivatives, etc.). And you can buy, sell, short, and call all day long with these things. It’s a great testing ground for finding out exactly how bad I’d actually be with real money. Of course, there’s the benefit that I can usually tell you with great accuracy which movies are coming out this weekend and, on Monday, how much they made. Basically, I lose my ass on a regular basis. For instance, I shorted The Devil Inside last weekend and lost about $1mm. It killed my HSX net worth. After seeing the trailer and reading a few early reviews, the movie looked (and likely is) awful and I thought that the word would get out after Friday night how bad it was. I figured that the numbers would fall off the rest of the weekend. Oh, how wrong I was. On Monday morning, Pajiba had a nice little piece on the Ten Highest Grossing Movies of Any Opening Weekend to Start the New Year. Hello! Meet the sucker!

There’s another arena in which I fear I have made a bad gamble with equally non-monetary losses. It’s the social media bet. Six months ago, Google+ entered the scene. In November 2011, I decided to go all in on G+ and exclusively engage there instead of FaceBook. I thought that a company as inventive and adept as Google would nail it. Was this a good move? I’ll tell you what I have found next week.

I wish that subject line was the title of the new novel that I've been writing. Sadly, it's a declaration of defeat. While I thought that I had the time and discipline for such a audacious effort, I found that I would not likely be able to keep up with the 1,667 words-per-day pace that would be required to put forth a 50,000 page novel by November 30th. Someday, maybe my schedule will allow it. For now, I'll have to back-burner the Great American Novel. That is all.

Here’s the deal. There’s really nothing wrong with Apple. Just like there’s nothing wrong with the New York Yankees.

Do the Yankees want to be the best?

Of course.

Do the Yankees pay for the best (or the perceived best)?

Absolutely.

Do the Yankees have an insufferable fan base in every corner of the Universe who have an undying allegiance to the team and will root any decision or product on the field for better or worse?

Unfortunately, yes.

And this is what makes the analogy really work for me. As stupid as this may sound, I hate Yankees because of their fans. I hate the Yankees exponentially more than the ridiculous team management decisions and personnel strategies because, frankly, their fans, on the whole, are front-running, band-wagon-riding, non-New-Yorker douches. That may be pretty ineloquent but it’s dead-in-the-crosshairs accurate.

Now, take that paradigm and apply it to Apple and you’ll be closer to understanding my innate distaste of Apple than any therapist.

Irrational? Maybe. I can live with that.

What I can't live with are the a) Apple sheeple and b) the rabid fanboys/girls. There is world outside of your little ecosystem and it's pretty decent. Your iPhone may have been the game-changer in 2007 but we've moved on. The margin is now much smaller. The players are playing and, sadly, your leader's gone. Let's just tap the brakes on Apple being the "best" of anything and all the "it just works" rhetoric. It's tired.

I can live with Apple’s existence from the shear standpoint of competition. Push Google to be better. Push Microsoft to…find itself? Push Facebook to…do something? Push the start-ups. In fact, you start to combine Siri AI technology with what Google’s doing with self-driving cars, I think you’re going to be shocked at the direction in which humans have pushed the race.

Yes, Thermonuclear annihilation.

Here we go. "Hope is not a strategy," as they say. I will be working on 2,500 words per day starting November 1st. By the time I'm done, I'm going to need counselling from an editor. And, a tall glass of Scotch.

For those who've never heard of it, head here.

It's no secret that I've never been an Apple fan. It's not for lack of trying or appreciation. The first computer that I ever remember in the house was an Apple IIe. I guess that was '83 or '84.

We moved on to a Windows-based machine later. I have no idea if it was an IBM or "PC clone." But, the transformation was made and we never had another Apple.

It wasn't until I went to Baylor that I started using Macs again. This was before the days of the ubiquitous laptop. I had a PC in my dorm room but all over campus were these Power Mac 4000 series that you could check your email on. Some of us still have our Baylor.edu addresses some 10 years later (Brian???).

I continued to use Macs at my work-study job at Baylor's Media Lab. This was a center where faculty and staff could come work on projects with assistance from smart-ass lackeys like myself. I remember doing some rudimentary photo-scanning and editing in 1999. I also created a database in FileMaker for a music history prof who wanted to catalog his classical music CD collection. Fun stuff, let me tell you. All done on a Mac.

So far, so good. Meanwhile, back at the Hankamer (controversially pronounced HAN-kam-er, not HANK-a-mer) School of Business we were cranking out our TPS Report Projects in the computer lab on Compaq Presarios (or some approximation). It suited us b-schoolers well: MS Office suite, training module authoring, SAS. You know, the usual suspects. That lab was probably all donated by Arthur Andersen anyway, which had a tight recruiting relationship with Baylor in those days. That is before they went all Enron and re-birthed as Accenture. I had enough exposure that my college brain was being rapidly wired for compatibility with Windows PCs.

Early in my career I used, built and supported PCs and Windows-based laptops. At home, I enjoyed casually tinkering with my own PC and upgrading it from time-to-time. I never saw any reason to spend the money to switch to a expensive, secretive computer company that wouldn't allow me to crack open a case without violating every contract they had ever conceived. I stick with my sandbox, thank you very much.

And, the marketing. Oh, the marketing. I'll never forget a particular exchange my roommates Winston and Matthew had over that famous late-90s Apple tagline: Think different. Winston explained that it was a concept. Think: Different. Like, think: wow! Only, Matthew-whose-mother-was-an-English-teacher would have none of it. "No way. It should be 'Think differently.' It's a adverb. They got it wrong." And, that was that. However, I never forgot the tagline so marketing must work. In hindsight, I'm wondering if Think different was the best that Apple could do. Were their products really that similar to Windows-based machines at the time?


It wasn't until the invention of the iPod that I really remember fans starting to come out the woodwork because then it was like crack just got distributed to the masses. "We'll give you a taste and get you hooked. Then, you'll come for our computers." Jobs had been back for a few years (from Pixar) and the Apple machine was really rocking. They ratcheted up the advertising and churned out some home-run products. There was no doubt that they were a quality company but the appeal to be cool by owning their stuff was a little obnoxious.

My "first" apple product in years was a 1st-generation iPod Mini. I played that thing until it died. No kidding. I modded it with a better battery and increased the memory and it finally croaked. It barely held together from my repeated breaches into its innards. I still have the carcass in a drawer somewhere. Saving it for the grand kids. I promptly replaced it with an 5th-gen iPod Nano. Fantastic music player. I bought a plastic shell for it and it's in pristine condition. I still use it in the car to listen to podcasts. Then, came the iPhone and that's when it all changed for me. But, that's for another post. Watch this...

Last night, I watched Disney's The Black Hole (1979) perhaps for the first time. While I don't recall thinking that I had ever seen it before, I can't completely rule it out. There are images and sounds from the movie that were seared in my memory. This morning, I realized that those memories were from a picture-story-read-along book that I had as a very young child. I was probably no more than two or three years old. I guess my parents would play the 7-inch record on my Fischer-Price record player and I would follow along in the book, turning the pages when the chime rang. The book was a G-rated re-creation of the movie. Even the voice actors on the recording were different from the film. The film is definitely not a kids' story. I've read that it was Disney's first PG film--chock full of "hells," "damns," and disturbing images.

I have to say its still held up in a haunting way. I undestand that TBH had its detractors who said it was a Star Wars knock-off or a watered-down 2001: A Space Odyssey. I think it's uniquely its own film. By far, the most thoughtful review I've found is here. John K. Muir likens it to a "Childhood Heart of Darkness" with many allusions to Jules Vernes' stories. The pre-CGI effects were phenomenal, as well. The aspects that don't hold up as well were the scoring which had these optimistic orchestral themes that played during dramatic shoot-outs between the crew and robots, leaving little doubt about which side would triumph. Regardless, it's a fascinating, brooding, dark movie that I'm glad I didn't see as a three-year-old. 

So, that happened.

Back when the geniuses at NetFlix decided to up their rates, I said: “I’m going to make a clean cut, here. And say no way, Corky!” Which meant that I was dropping the Instant View streaming service. Little did I realize that I would be in-effect dropping NetFlix and staying with QuiXckStererer? It doesn’t matter what they call it. They have content that I want and it gets delivered in a reasonable time to my mailbox. Aside from the occasional DVD skip (Always at the 1 hour mark!! Why, God, why???), I still think the quality is superior to the streaming version. Until we have ridiculously-fast bandwidth coverage (Hello, South Korea!!) and HD-quality sound and video streaming along with more content that I could ever want (I’m looking at you Hot New Television Shows from 2011), then I ain’t biting.

So…cry me a river, everyone. Cause we’re Quickxquester People, now!