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I had a goal for this eight-day work trip to Philadelphia. It’s not a lofty goal, but it’s important we set goals. Mine: eat a Philly cheese steak at least once a day. I want to find the best, or more specifically, my favorite.

First out, we have Geno’s. It’s 1 am and Trade Show Lyle and I are on the way to the hotel from the airport. We have the cabbie stop at Geno’s. Order, the sandwich (steak wit whiz) at one window, and the soda and fries from the other. And make sure you order in English. Why? Because they’re grouchy and think it’s funny. This place is across the street from Pat’s (more later). Two competing cheese steak places on opposite corners of the same intersection. The area has a miniature Time’s Square feel to it: lots of neon, a diagonal intersection and plenty of pedestrians milling about. The sandwich was disappointing. Dry sliced beef and semi-melted provolone cheese. The fries were nothing special. I almost wonder if my expectations were so high, Geno’s was doomed for failure.

Trip two, we walked by Rick’s, near the Pennsylvania Convention Center. This is a touristy part of town. Rick’s is billed as a third generation steakhouse. Somewhere I read that companies being run by third generation family leadership have an 80 percent failure rate. Rick’s is a good example. If it wasn’t in a tourist haven, Rick’s would really have little reason to live. Fatty, pre-sliced beef and cheese whiz. Sub par fries and cheap ketchup. This is strike two.

Third on the list is Jim’s. This was a good steak! Jim’s on South had a long, but quickly-moving line, and when it comes to cheese steak establishments, lines are important. Jim’s does it right: tasty chopped steak with optional peppers, onions, whiz and mushrooms. A fair amount of grease. NO fries. Just a fabulous sandwich. Indoor, upstairs seating with a view of the busy street below. Tons of celebrity photos. Oh, and this is the only place that’ll serve you a beer with your steak. The standard has been set.

Next is Pat’s, across the street from Geno’s. Again with the two windows for ordering. Like ordering your soda with the sandwich will affect the quality. Chopped beef on a roll. It’s good, but second-place good. If I lived in the neighborhood, I might come back again. Otherwise, there’s not much to say.

At Ishkabibble’s you order on the street. It’s in view of the standard setting Jim’s, and comes highly recommended by D.J. Jazzy Jeff. If you want to eat inside, you have to secure one of the eight stools or stand at the tiny counter space lining the walls of the skinny dining area. Decent steak. Chopped beef and an interesting dish: Spanish fries. They toss some raw peppers and onions in with the fries while they’re cooking. It’s a little spicy, and pretty good. I guess you’ll notice I paid more attention to the fries than the sandwich.

On day five, we get in the taxi and head out to Johnny’s Hots. It got five out of five grease stains from an online reviewer. $12 into the ride, we discover, Johnny’s Hots is closed. The building is still there, with a sign and everything, but there’s an empty parking lot and boarded up windows. So we move down the list of joints. $20 into the cab ride, we find Gooey Looies located in the middle of a sketchy looking strip mall, with one employee and absolutely NO line. We pass. But the cab driver came to the rescue with his favorite place: Tony Luke’s.

Tony Luke’s is right next to the freeway, in the vicinity of the Philadelphia ball parks. This was a really good sliced-beef steak. The sandwich was on the greasier side of this week’s steaks, and I went through a respectable stack of napkins. Deciding how this compares to the standard of Jim’s, I have to think about it. I would definitely come back for this. But no beer. : (

On our final night, it’s back to Jim’s for a repeat visit. Confirming our previous steak experience, this is SO good. Sandwich, beer, view, pictures, bought the T-Shirt. Done.

Cheese Steak Ranking:

1. Jim’s Steaks
2. Tony Luke’s
3. Pat’s King of Steaks
4. Ishkabibble’s
5. Geno’s Steaks
6. Rick’s

Final note: Philadelphia is Sandwich Town. Dinic’s, in the Reading Terminal, is the sandwich place. I ate there four times (partially due to it’s proximity to the convention center, but mainly because their sandwiches are completely addicting). Get there for lunch, because if you show up for an afternoon sandwich, they might be out of meat. It’s reassuring to know they don’t have an endless supply of suspicious meat. And they don’t offer a cheese steak.

Let me first say there are things I don’t know due to my own apathetic ignorance. Google could solve some of this, but sometimes I don’t have the energy to hit the Search button. But in this case, I’m on a plane as I type this, and I can’t find a wireless network to fact check any of this. Also, let me say that I dig the Obama campaign in a big, big way. I’m all for an aggressive Democrat.

But, Obama is opting out of $80 million in public campaign financing, in favor of raising and spending his own cash. I don’t want to talk about this in the framework of McCain and flip-flopping or not. No, I have been thinking about how much money Obama is thought to be capable of raising. I read $500 million! Of course, given the choice of being able to spend $80 million or $500 million, I’d choose the half a billion, too. But here are my questions:

• From whom do the donations come?

Individuals are limited to $2300 per candidate, right? I’m curious of the average campaign donation, and what percentage of the presidential candidates’ coffers is from those donating the maximum. (And in a sidebar curiosity, how may crazy-rich people donate the maximum to multiple candidates in their mindset of choice). One $2000 contributor equals forty $50 contributors or a hundred $20 contributors. I assume there are more on the low end, and the majority of contributors are not crazy-rich land barons with two grand in cash burning holes in their pockets. I further assume Obama is making bank from those lower-end contributors partially thanks to the Internet.

The Obama campaign is not the first to succeed with this, but to me, raising money off the Internet means one thing: processing credit card transactions. In other words, taking money from people who are spending money they don’t necessarily have, yet.

• What percentage of campaign donations to any candidate, movement or 527 group results in credit card debt for the contributor?

In his video announcing he was opting out of the public system, Obama said roughly: “You fueled this campaign with donations of $5, $10, $20, whatever you can afford, and because you did we built a grass-roots movement of more than 1.5 million people … let’s build the first general election campaign that is truly funded by the American people.”

So, I guess ultimately, I’m asking this: is the Obama campaign creating half a billion dollars in credit card debt?

He says the election system is broken. OK. But I really like the idea of taking a bit of the money out of this election. The crazy-rich can still spend their money. They won’t miss it. And political operatives will find a way to spend it.

Six months of waiting. Four months of training. One day of driving. Three hours, seven minutes of racing. June 8, 2008, I Escaped from Alcatraz.

I had a goal time (3:15) and a dream time (3 hours). I missed my dream time by seven minutes. Holy Shit!

The Swim
A mile and a half across the San Francisco Bay. The three prisoners who came closest to escaping from Alcatraz are assumed to have drowned before they reached the mainland. I, on the other hand, made the swim in 41 minutes.

We got up at 4:20. Sunday morning traffic in SF is minimal, but this morning, there were plenty of cyclists making their pre-dawn way to the race. Gavin and I rode our bikes down to the race transition area to catch a bus to the ferryboat landing. We milled about the dock for an hour or so, getting body marked, hanging out in porta-potties and trying to talk about politics to keep ourselves from getting too anxious.

About 7 we left the dock. At 8 a.m., the air horn blew and 1800 competitors started piling off the boat. A perfectly good boat. Because the tide was moving out, swimming the bay was essentially like swimming across a huge river. This made the mile and a half a very fast swim, and while at times I felt like I wasn’t moving, before I knew it a wave picked me up and buried both of my hands in sand. I had arrived! So, I got up and started running down a chute of hundreds of people cheering and leading me to my bike. It was awesome.

The Bike
San Francisco’s pretty hilly, by the way. We had driven the bike route the day before, and I was fully daunted by the prospect of surviving the bike ride. It’s basically made up of continuous uphill grades with only a couple of extreme down hill stints. In other words: lots of up with not so much down. And to make it worse, every downhill stretch is followed by a sharp turn. This totally kills your momentum.

Since the ride is 18 miles out and back, those extreme downhill parts on the way out are the extreme uphill parts on the way back. While pedaling up the worst of the hills, I was with a few other riders, joking and commiserating about the pain. I discovered the combination of joking and complaining is a great way to pass the time while climbing steep hills. Who knew?

I managed the 18 miles in 1:05. I felt great. The last few miles into the transition were either downhill or flat, and I was flying. My Softride is a pretty fast bike. So, even coasting, I was passing people.

The Run
My two primary brick workouts prior to the race left me with shin cramps (these hurt precisely as much as they sound). Here? Nothing. I had to work out the cycling stiffness, but my legs felt great.

As Gavin pointed out, this race had just about every possible running terrain: concrete, loosely packed dirt, packed dirt, bricks, wood chips, trails, sand, wood steps, stairs, sand stairs.

I settled in for eight miles. I passed a bit, got passed a bit and occasionally got stuck behind people walking ridiculously slow up some stairs. Halfway through the run, we hit the beach for a while and then headed up the infamous sand stairs. The sand stairs are 400 uneven logs leading up a sandy hill. At the top of the stairs, I had four more miles to look forward to.

The last two miles were tough. I had kept pace with a few people and I noticed a few others falling away. Eventually, I could see the huge inflatable finish line. The last mile, I turned it on. With everything I had left, I poured it on. Turning the last corner, I was pretty sure I heard Barb, Elaine, Tawsha and J yell, but I was focused on breathing and form. I finished strong at an hour and twelve minutes.

3:07.

It was 11 a.m. and I had been up for almost eight hours. I Escaped from Alcatraz without a hitch. Now I just had to wait for the photos. And then there is the video.

I remember, back in the day, Cherry Coke was officially launched. Then, all of the sudden, there was Wild Cherry Pepsi. Sure a one percent swing in the Cola market share is worth millions, so I get Pepsi’s motivation to introduce a copycat product for Cherry Coke. But I still thought it was odd to launch a product just because the other guys were doing it. Even as a junior high school chump, trying to keep myself from following everyone else jumping off that bridge…

Well, that was, like, 20 years ago. And the more things change the more they stay the same. Last year there was Miller Chill: Miller beer’s answer to people buying Corona and dropping in a slice of lime and a couple of shakes of salt. Miller Chill has a hint of lime & salt. I’ve tried it, and it reminds me of something like Taos: chick beer. It took me and my friend Simon the better part of a six-pack to decide we didn’t care for it.

Anyway, new this year is Bud Light Lime (Bud Light with a splash of lime): another competitive copycat product to try and retain a tiny sliver of the beer mass market.

So, I still get “me, too” products when you are Coke vs. Pepsi or Miller vs. Bud. But what if we were talking about Coke vs. Fresca?

What about other competitive relationships?

Does it make sense for a market leader to compete on a “me, too” level? No. Chances are you didn’t get to be the market leader by merely maintaining the status quo. And if a competitor has caught you off guard with a new product, now is not the time for you to act like the underdog. If you’ve been scooped, step back. Take stock. Look beyond. What is it that made you the market leader in the first place? It was capturing lightning in a bottle. Put yourself in the position to do it again. That’s not going to happen by letting your competition do your product development.

Does it make sense for a guerilla in the market to compete on a “me, too” level? No. The market leader got there for a reason, and a duplicate product with a different brand on it is rarely worth a switch. You need to pull off that next generation product the market leader has been trying to get at for a couple of years. You get to do the scooping, because you’re smaller and faster and can shake up the status quo. Plus you don’t have to worry about introducing something new and instantly obsolescing everything you built your market leadership on. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.

And besides, copying a product is no fun, because it is obvious you are copying what you believe to be a good idea. And that idea is someone else’s.

UPDATE: We went to Lake Chelan last weekend, and Simon had some of the Bud Light Lime. I didn’t want it, and I didn’t want to like it, but I tried it. It was Delicious! You should try it.