Confessions of an Undercover Geek

Last night the 38th President Gerald Ford came back to Washington D.C. This time though it wasn’t for a state dinner or some special occasion. On Tuesday Ford passed away. He was being brought to Washington DC so that there could lie in state at the US Capitol Building, which gives the public the ability to pay their respects, and for the state funeral which will be on Tuesday.

Some of my buddies and I decided to go downtown on Saturday evening to go see what was happening. None of us were old enough to remember Pres. Ford but it wasn’t everyday that a president passes away that he cames back for a state funeral. Who knows when it would happen again?

Around 6:30, we hung out around one of the entrances to the Capitol premises. From afar we watched as the motorcade carrying Ford’s remains entered. There was a pretty impressive number of VIP’s in their unmarked black sedans and SUV’s.

Security was also pretty impressive. There was Capitol Police, Park Police, DC Police, and Marines about everywhere you looked. Most of the roads were shut off around the Capitol. We saw the Vice President’s motorcade as it zipped to go back to where it was going. According to the officer who was by us, the motorcade is actually by law allowed to hit and run people over. He said the worst that has ever happened is that someone has had their toes run over. It was just impressive to see how high security was.

So then we got in line to go into the Capitol Building. They told us that it would be about a two hour wait from where we were. We snaked our way through this really well developed pre-made line system that they had created. You could tell that they were expecting a big crowd in the days to come.

It only ended taking us about an hour and forty five minutes to get into the building. After getting through some more security, you walked up this flight of stairs straight into the rotunda.

Once you got into the rotunda, there was this surreal feeling. First the amount of history that surrounds is mind blowing. There is so much history just dripping from the walls of where we were, the short walk we took around the casket didn’t do it justice. Then there was the casket. It was like there was President-size personality in the room. You weren’t just seeing a man who passed away in a wood box. It was something more. It was a man who had played an important role in American history.

All-in-all it was a very positive experience. I was glad that I went last night. I am glad I got to go with my friends. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is in the DC area. If you can brave the security, the wait, and the cold weather, it is absolutely worth it to go to the Capitol Building and pay your respects to the former President Gerald Ford.

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More and more people are saying that 2007 is going to be a banner year for RSS. The big hurdle is that RSS is too geeky. Many people have admitted to that. What’s the answer?

Apple iTunes has done great things for media. The iTunes store has allowed me to discover, try, and purchase movies, tv shows, music, podcasts, or audio books. I then have the media in my own library. I can use the media files whenever I want. When there is a new episode of a podcast, I get that too.

We need a program that will be the iTunes of RSS. It would be a warehouse of all the different blogs and rss feeds that are available out there. I could search for them. I would get recommendations for ones that I would like. I would them be able to subscribe to the RSS feed. I would then be able to have my subscribed rss feeds all within the same application to read whenever I want from wherever I want.

If the whole experience is put into one program, it doesn’t matter what technology is being used because people won’t have to interact with the technology directly. The web site or the piece of software will do all that for me.

What are some other ideas? What could we do in 2007 in order to make RSS/blogs are more ubiquitous aspect of our lives?

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If you haven’t heard, the ever popular Digg.com just raised $8.2 million dollars in a round of venture capital funding. Good for them! Hopefully they’ll be able to use the money to take the site to the next level.

I still think Digg’s biggest hurdle is how do you get it to be used beyond male geeks. There was a huge example of this on the Digg home page today. As of 10:30pm Eastern time, the story “Jessica Biel high resolution bikini beach pictures” had 1830 diggs.

Do you reasonably expect me to go to my mom and tell her that she should start using Digg.com as a source for info when bikini photos is a top story? My mom wouldn’t give it more two seconds and then decide to never go to the site again.

The “mom test” is how I judge whether or not the site could go big time.

Using Technorati Find Related Blog Posts on: digg, venture capital, funding, growth, kevin rose

The word is that the Apple iTunes Store is going to sell videos of whole college football bowl games. I really like this.

I really enjoy college sports but can’t always watch the game when its being aired. I can’t yet justifying paying for Cable and Tivo. Being able to download games off of iTunes is perfect.

If I had a downloaded copy of the game, maybe I’d go back and watch the game again after the first time that I watched. This is something I wouldn’t have been able to do before.

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The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and the MacWorld Expo both kick off here in the next couple of weeks. It is always fun to watch the blogosphere and how everything is covered.

Where do you guys recommend that I watch? Engadget is usually pretty solid.

What do you think Steve Jobs will announce at his MacWorld keynote? The iPhone? new iPod? I’d really like to see the new iPod. It’d be nice to be able to utilize the tv shows from iTunes while I commute to and from work.

Bill Gates is doing a keynote at CES. Will it bomb as bad as last year? I turned it off about 15 minutes into it.

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The big news in Washington D.C and as I’m sure most of you have heard is that the former President Gerald R. Ford passed away. You could tell this morning when walking to work that things were a little bit more of a buzz then usual.

Ford’s remains will be coming to DC on Saturday where it will lie in state at the US Capitol Building before going to the National Cathedral.

As a newly minted resident of the Washington D.C. Metropolitan area, this is kind of exciting. It is not everyday that a president passes away. For him to lie in state and to have a state funeral is a pretty big deal in history and I get to be here for it, which is exciting.

Saturday night I plan on going to the Capitol Building to check out what happens. It should be interesting. I’ll take photos, if they let me, and blog about it after.

Ford’s presidency was before my time and I have to admit that I don’t know more about them the basics from history. Over the next couple days, I want to learn more about the Ford Presidency.

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Digg.com recently launched a really great feature which allows people to go through and digg different podcasts. You can digg a whole podcast or you can digg specific episodes. This is great for unearthing really great podcasts that I have never heard of.

I really enjoy listening to podcasts at work. It just usually doesn’t work out that I can watch a video podcast but its pretty easy to listen to something

I wish Digg.com would distinguish between audio and video podcasts. I wish I could have it just show audio podcasts.

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Today my dad and I went to the local Cingular Store. They just launched their 3G service, which gives me much higher speeds to access the mobile web. I wanted to pick up a new phone so that I could switch to the new service.

I was chatting with some of the store people about what I wanted to do with the phone. I mentioned that I could blog from my phone. You could tell that the word blog was just throwing him for a loop. He didn’t know what a blog was.

It was very much an awakening for me. I hang out with bloggers, talk about blogging, and work on blogs. It is easy to lose the perspective.

Steve Rubel in a recent post made a really great point that there is a growing digital divide between the technophiles and the technophobes. I think he’s absolutely right. Us geeks get all excited about these new technologies and how they wil change the world. But we forget that the vary nature of geekiness is that we are going to adopt stuff before everybody else does.

What do we need to do in 2007 to have blogs and RSS make sense to everyone and not just the super geeks?

Is the metaphor of a widget making more sense? Could you widgetize a web site and allow people to put it on their personal news aggregator?

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Apparently, Facebook’s 22 year old company chief Mark Zuckerberg has just turned down an offer of $1.65 billion dollars from Yahoo! That’s CRAZY. Mark is 22 years old. Thats my age.

I can understand how it would be easy to want to take the money and run but Mark said no. I respect Mark a lot for that. Maybe I just don’t understand but what would selling Facebook give them, other then a lot of money? Why not try and build out Facebook?

Facebook seems like one of the few companies on the Web that is really driving the way that we start conversations and form community. It seems like that is the thing you want to hold on to and not sell.

Why wouldn’t you just move to take Facebook public? Is there a business model around Facebook? Probably not. There at least doesn’t seem to be a really sustainable business model around Facebook.

This is just me thinking out loud.

Digg the story, “Facebook creator turns down $1.6 billon offer from Yahoo.”

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I have been a Cingular customer for a few years now. I have been super happy with their service. Recently, I have been using their data plans more and more because I want access to the mobile web.

They just announced their Third Generation (3G) Cellular technology. It is supposed to be really fast, like DSL speeds. I’m thinking about switching over.

What phone should I get? Have any of you switched to 3G? Do you feel the speed bump?

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