… my fantastic Stepmom and my incredible Mom.

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First, Skype. I feel like the last guy getting on the Skype train. The last hold out. Listen. It’s not worth it. The holding out part, I mean. Skype is pretty fantastic!

We just had a baby, yadda, yadda. My Mom was in town for a few weeks to help us get settled. Having her go home was a big, big change in our little guy’s life. But check this out. Two days later, Evan got to see and hear his Grandma again. Even better, he also got to see and hear his Nanna; and his cousins Kali and Kaitlyn got to see and hear Evan for the first time.

You can only say so much about the video phone concept, and I was still on the fence until we actually tried it. I’m sold. It is intoxicating.

Second is Netflix, again. I’m an old school Netflx subscriber. I left for a while, but came back for lots of reasons. I was bummed for a while that the Watch Instantly feature wasn’t available for Macs for a long time, but they finally came around.

So, last Tuesday I got a surprise Netflix disc in the mail. When put in my Wii, I get to watch all this stuff instantly on my TV. All this content right there to browse and watch. I’m a Dish Network subscriber and have a few minor complaints. The On-Demand stuff is slow; the broadband connection has never worked right with multiple customer service calls. In general we’re happy, but the Netflix/Wii system worked flawlessly within 5 minutes of the disc being taken out of the mailbox.

The timing of these is great, what with the baby leading to us continuing our homebody trend for a bit longer.

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Ski to Sea, for those that don’t know, is a seven-leg race from the Mt. Baker Ski Area to Marine Park in Bellingham. I did the Cross Country Ski leg last year. It was my rookie year, and I did pretty well for not having cross country skied in 25 years.

So I’m doing the running leg this year. It is eight miles down hill from the Ski Area to the Shuksan Department of Transportation station. It’ll be the fastest eight miles I ever run.

I’ve dreaded doing this leg of the race because running eight miles downhill is pretty hard on the body. Knees, shins, toe nails, etc. Also, there is an added factor this year. I won’t be able to devote as much time to training as previous years, because I’ve got a new baby boy that is interesting me a bit more than running 20-25 miles a week in the rain in preparation.

Adding to the time issue is the fact that the run starts at more than 3,500 feet above sea level, and the oxygen content is some 20% lower than at my house. So I’ll need to make a few trips up to the mountain to train and acclimate myself to dealing with less oxygen. There is a 2,000-foot drop in elevation over the length of the run, so I will get more and more oxygen, I just want to make sure I don’t wipe myself out in the first mile.

The good point: it is a good way to kick off my summer training and fitness. If I don’t do it, I will run way less, and not be in shape at all for swimsuit season.

Anyway, I’m doing it. Memorial day weekend, I’m going to wake up at 5 a.m., ride up to the Mountain with Ryan and Jonathan, stand around a ski lodge for a couple of hours in running shorts and a t-shirt, and then run with abandon down the mountain.

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I’ve found myself opening my Blackberry RSS reader at red traffic lights. I’ve had my lovely wife pull the Blackberry from my hands during dinner with friends. I’ve found myself watching TV while being logged onto Facebook, clicking through emails on my Blackberry and talking on the phone.

Frankly, I’ve hit a wall. It’s OK to be connected, but I have made the decision to not live my life connected moment to moment. Two things led to this decision.

1. A few years ago I was on a whale watching boat ride. Camera in hand, and hearing the oohs and ahhs of other passengers, I would swing around trying to capture the jumping whale on a memory stick. I was not very successful. And I didn’t get to actually see many of the whales because I was too busy staring at the LCD screen of my camera. Finally, I gave up on the camera and just started watching nature.
2. More recently I went to a marketing automation seminar a couple of weeks ago. Participants were encouraged to tweet the event in real time… during presentations. This seemed like a good idea, but I noticed that in order to tweet I needed to stop paying attention to the speaker. And then to follow the Twitter event feed, I was staring at my Blackberry, not paying much attention to the event itself. And to top that, most of the tweets were simple regurgitations of some of the key points of the person currently speaking.

I’m done. It’s over. I check my email when I have a second. I’ll tweet when something comes up (usually when I’m traveling).

As a marketer, I’ve been curious how these hyper-connected tools will be monetized. There is more to think about here. I’ve had my toe dipped in this water from a business perspective for a couple of years, but still, I’ve got to marinate a bit more on this.

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The late 90s brought us wacky, non sequitur company names. Ostensibly this was because of the quest for a unique .com url. So we got Monster.com, instead of jobs.com. Instead of Search.com we get Google.

But in some cases, I think we’ve gone round the bend. A few I’ve been seeing lately include:

• Survey Monkey – I would never send a survey to a customer that had the word Monkey anywhere near it. And I like monkeys as much as the next guy.
• Silverpop – This makes me think of either a metallic candy or being the first loser at the Olympics.
• Meltwater – If water is already melted, doesn’t that imply this company wants to charge me for something that has already been done?
• e{insert word] – To of course signify that your using electricity in your technological innovation.
• i[insert word] – Thank you, iPod.

I work for a rather conservative private company. As well, I get regular cold calls from company wanting to sell us services. To me the best names are ones that capture the essence of the product or service. And from a potential vendor perspective, I’d recommend using words that your potential customers will want to be associated with.

All this being said Survey Monkey is out there and doing fine, but I’ll stick with Constant Contact.

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Here are a few things that bother me about her decision and her supporters’ defense of it:

She says once she decided to not run for re-election, her role as a lame duck was pointless. My thought: bullshit. By not running for office again she would get the opportunity to put politics aside and work with whomever she wants to get things accomplished and display her “leadership” skills without worrying about campaigning, raising money or making interest groups happy. It’s an opportunity to do what you think is right, without the money, politics and influence that leads to compromise and homogenization.

President Obama resigned his office as Senator, which makes Palin’s resignation OK. Obama resigned his office because he was elected to a higher office. That’s pretty much how the system works! This would have been demonstrated by McCain had he won. Additionally this has happened with Bush II, Clinton, Ford, Johnson, etc. Voters tend to elect people that have proved electable.

Quitting now will give her the ability to accomplish more than if she was in office. Let’s use John Edwards to discuss this one. Edwards didn’t run for a second term in the Senate after the losing VP candidate with Kerry (but he did finish his term, as he committed to his constituents). His Titanic-sized ego wouldn’t let him run a losing campaign for Senator. He started the Poverty Center and worked on his Presidential campaign for 2 years. Look how that worked out. He was pretty much always running for 3rd place. And this was all before the love child/affair brouhaha.

Leaving office in Alaska will give her a bigger national pulpit. Again, ask John Edwards about that one. It gives her a bigger pulpit with the people that care about her already, conservative Republicans. She will have plenty of opportunities to preach to the choir (please forgive the metaphor). But once she leaves office, the newsworthiness of what she says on a random Tuesday will be significantly less.

Palin is getting judged so critically because she is a conservative family woman. Hillary got dragged over the rocks, through the mud and into the fire. Edwards got, rightfully, filleted. McCain got treated pretty roughly as a grump. Obama is still surrounded by crazy conspiracies. Media scrutiny and criticism is not exclusive to Party or gender. But it is an easy scapegoat. In fact given the pass the Bush Administration was given in the early aughts, I’m not sure the media is scrutinizing enough, holding our leaders accountable.

McCain decided to not win the campaign because he realized how bad the economy was, and whoever won would be limited to one term, sullied with the Bush recession. Huh? Someone ask Senator McCain about that one.

She quit because she foresees a higher calling. I hope that higher calling is her family or her religion. If she pursues any higher office, she better not expect her treatment to be any different.

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Flash forward to today. McDonalds is really pushing their espresso, mochas and iced mochas. How much do they cost? $3.99.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

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