Google Phone and Honesty in Business

I have been paralyzed by indecision on whether or not to buy another cell phone. The issues, beyond my own need to validate myself through a cool phone? The iPhone is cool, has loads of interesting if meaningless applications (other than Avego) and brands you techno-hip, but I hate the touchscreen keyboard and it doesn’t work well for corporate email/calendaring. The Blackberry has none of the Apple buzz but is much more practical AND has brickbreaker. Sprint Instinct is a Sprint phone. Nuf said. My Treo 650 still works well but the whole industry and public is basically shunning it and Palm. Do I want to be in the coalition of the shunned? And finally the upcoming HTC Dream AKA Google phone, which will be announced on Tuesday. I said I would wait until the Gphone came out before buying a new phone so the waiting may be about to end.

I am not sure if honesty is always the best policy in business. I went to lunch today with a former client who is with a new company. I thought it would be a good new business opportunity. I water and dine him over Pad See Yew with chicken, tell a few intelligent and funny stories and presto, I have a new client. Except he started the conversation with how much he hates his job and his company. From there, I could not smoothly ask him if a blog strategy would change anything. And when he asked me how I was doing at work, I went with the generic, unthinking "things are good" response almost by rote. That kind of killed the conversation since I didn't meet his honesty with an equal peak behind the curtains. So we bitched about California public schools and called it a day.

Tonight’s podcast is going to be on the financial meltdown, instant replay is killing sports, and celebrity blogging. I have to somehow figure out how to drive our listener base beyond 30 people. I admit, this is 30 more people than I would expect to listen to my uninformed opinions but I have done the Facebook group thing, the mass email, the blog banner (see above). Maybe having more friends would help.

Alcohol and sponsorship

The reasons for my passion for Lance are many. Other than his ridiculous fitness level, drive and passion for endurance sports, the primary reason for my adulation is his simplification of decisions into right or wrong, black or white, on or off, one or zero. He doesn’t spend a lot of time agonizing over decisions, or reflecting backwards on ones that go wrong. Sure, introspection can be important but there is more time wasted doing that than intelligence gained. I want that, I need that, the clarity of the pure decision. In my work experience the VP, marketing and CEOs I admire aren’t the ones who make smart decisions, it's the one who make and fast ones. Fire, aim, ready.

I will get sponsored. Whether it is Zappos, Sports Basement Schwartz Communications, or Baker Breakfast Cookies in the next six months someone is going to pay me, in cash, goods or services for the chance to associate their brand with my fanatic addiction to endurance sports. My value has to be in my commitment rather than my performance since I don’t really have the results or the game. I am kind of like the Sarah Palin of marathons and triathlons. Like Palin, I am not the best at what I do but I appeal to the average Joe who wants to see themselves in me. I might not be able to win the New York Marathon but with a little luck and hard work I could finish 5,256^th. Don’t admire the A game, go with the C+.

I have almost reached my end point with alcohol. I was never a committed drinker. In high school, college and into my mid 20s, I could hang for one weekend party of many beers or mixed drinks but would limp my way through the next night with no second wind. Then I started becoming a lightweight once I had kids. Sleep was hard to come by with screaming babies so the sleep better be sober and pure. Divorce followed and the drinker in me was reborn for a couple of years. But once my endurance addiction took hold, even the slightest hangover was a huge bummer. Last night two glasses of wine turned me into a whiny bitch (read in the voice of Omar of The Wire) this morning. I don’t like the pain of the next morning at all. It’s worse then my friends yelling at me for being no fun.

Personal growth and PR Parties

Rebecca was commenting yesterday that my blog entries from 2005 are almost exactly the same as from this week. Does that make me a consistent person true to my beliefs and passions or a boring person who is not evolving on any level? Also, should the events, if there are any, that are contributing to my evolution, be documented and easy to detect on my psyche through a few random paragraphs every few months? OK, so a big event yesterday was deciding to do the California International Marathon with December 7 with Duanne. When Jesus saved another soul, did everyone get bored and say not again, go work on your carpenter skills for Pharaoh's sake?

I have one of my two weekly conversations with Ben today who is in school in Bend, OR. It is amazing speaking with him because nine months ago he would not even talk to me, and now we have these open and honest (although short) conversations about anything. It is also slightly nerve wracking in that I am trying to cram substantive bits into the discussion but also want to keep it light, all within a seven and 15 minute time limit. He definitely gets it and he ends up sounding like the adult most of the time.

I am going to a party tonight at Emily and Kathleen's new office. They opened their own PR agency about a year ago and are showing off their new crib. The invite list is hilarious; former coworkers who all work at semi competitive agencies. Kind of like Obama winning and inviting all the key members of the McCain campaign. Although I don't think anyone takes high tech PR as seriously as Karl Rove. I am trying to get approval from Emily to Twitter live from the party on the fascinating discussions on open source and cloud computing.

Random Bits

Colin Northway is pissing me off. He is the faceless stranger who lives within 60 feet of me who has generously, without knowledge,been providing me with free WiFi for the last year or so. I think he found out and I have now been bounced off his network. Maybe he objected to the amount of times I was accessing livestrong.com for the latest Lance update or searching in vain for more friends on Facebook in order to catch Tbex. I think I need to actually contact him to try and share the cost of his service. But that would require talking to a neighbor. Unprecedented.

Don’t ever try and wear a Dri Fit shirt that you use for running on a plane. You will be shunned. For the first time ever, I underpacked this weekend and ended up with no clean shirts for my plane ride home, other than a running shirt that I had “washed” in the shower. Thinking that it would be OK to wear, I wore it for the 3 hour drive to JFK and didn’t think there were any problems (It’s not necessarily a good thing to be used to your own odor) until the pregnant woman sitting next to me in aisle 11 on the Virgin America flight practically started gagging. And my friend Dave barely acknowledged me when we surprisingly discovered we were on the same plane. So I did a subtle change into a sweater and pregnant lady stopped gagging and merely glared at me for the rest of the trip. She didn't like the hot bodies on Entourage.

The comeback of Lance has motivated me to reengage in endurance sport events rather than just aimlessly run 8 miles a day, four days \ a week. It probably won’t be anything new; I’ll go back to running a marathon or Ironman with more ambitious goals. But I also need a mission that has nothing to do with running or lifting, like Lance’s cancer mission. And I don’t have a
clue. It has to motivate me and inspire me, rather than be a checklist item like volunteering for some cause, done.

Losing the Fitness Edge

I spent the weekend with Sam playing a lot of football, which constitutes the two of us throwing the ball back and forth to each other, occasionally running pass routes to make it more realistic. We also went to the track and timed each other running 40 yard dashes, the typical distance for football players. This reinforced that I my lack of speed has only gotten worse as I have gotten older, and sprinting is hard. I ran 6-8 miles all three days at my usual 7:15 to 7:45 per mile pace this weekend with little problem, but sprinting 40 yards is a wrenching painful process. Should I fight this example of aging?

I can still run distances over three miles as fast as ever and I am lifting more (albeit with the help of Creatine) than ever so I am not I total physical decline. However, my 12 and 14 year-old sons are definitely starting to surpass me in activities requiring constant explosive action such
as jumping (basketball) and stopping and starting (football, tag, basketball). I have no fear of losing to them, especially if I am trying my hardest, but given that my physical prowess is so important to me, I have a big fear of watching the inevitable decline spread across other activities as measured by my regular eight-mile run and bench press number

To prolong this from happening, I should shake things up and stop doing the same thing every workout, which I have been doing for over 10 years. It doesn’t need to be radical change. One speed and agility workout a day, stretch every day, should do it. But am I prepared to get out of my workout rut? My goal was always to get to a place where I was doing a hard workout everyday but it had gotten to the point of repetition, that I was physically able to do it relatively easily and mentally it was rote like brushing my teeth. I am at that point but rote is not going to cut it if I want to hang with Sam and Ben in one-on-one basketball much longer.

Social networking

To continue a rant from the latest podcast; I don’t know what to think of social networks and their affect on my social life. I like being around people and having friends, but I lose momentum once the interactions become less frequent. In high school and college, it was easy to maintain friendships. You saw your friends everyday and you could engage in my favorite topics of discussion; the everyday minutia of life. After college when we moved to different cities, the everyday discussion ended and it became weekly or monthly conversations where the discussions was either a summary of the minutia (less compelling), big events (less interesting) or dead air. And I don’t like talking on the phone.

So the result has been friendships that have stalled or died all together. And this includes some of my closest friends. It’s sad but seemed inevitable. Enter social networks. The beauty of Facebook is two fold. First, with everyone joining and the network effect kicking in, you can find people from high school who you haven’t talked to in years. One click and they are in your group. Second, you can quickly, after the initial, “summarize my life in the last 25 years” email, start sending quick snippets every couple of days that provide random updates on the minutia of your life. This can also be done with Facebook status updates or using Twitter. For example, Elena just lost her job and got engaged on the same day and let everyone know using Facebook. Some might call this impersonal but boom, in 15 seconds she let everyone know what was going on in her life.

With my fear of the phone, Facebook et al seem like the solution for being a social guy. But there are drawbacks. I have been accused of keeping things on the surface. It is relatively easy to get to know me on a basic level but becoming close to me is hard. I put up walls around me which prevent real friendships from forming. Does Facebook, which as a medium keeps things surface, perpetuate this even further. Does connecting with 345 people at once equal having in depth conversations with six. Quality over quantity?

End of an Era

I just bought tickets for a Yankees-A's game on July 20 at the Stadium in what could be the last time I go to Mecca. I think it is a joke that they are building a new Yankee Stadium. While I am one of those people who think sports have changed for the worst (e.g., tennis was a much better sport to watch when they used wooden rackets, college and pro basketball are both suffering from one and done athletes, massive celebrating from an eight yard screen pass is a joke), I think building a new Yankee Stadium is wrong for economic reasons.

Yankee Stadium, like Fenway and Wrigley, is an American temple, comparable to the Coliseum, Wimbledon Center Court or Alpe D'Huez. People who aren't even baseball fans go to the Stadium so they can say they were part of history . Aura and mystique aren't strippers; they do exist at 161st Street in the Bronx. Once the Yankees move to their new crib, even though it is next door, the attraction that is the House that Ruth Built is gone. The House that Hank and Hal built is worthless as a memory.

I have probably been to about 15-20 games at Yankee Stadium
and they were all incredible. Highlights include:

July or August 1973 - My first Yankee game with my mom and sister. Felipe Alou and Bobby Murcer are the Yankee stars. They lose to the Red Sox but I don't have an ulcer as the meaning is lost on me. I get a free bat as we stumbled unknowingly onto bat day.

September 1976 - Chris Chambliss hits a three-run homer with the Yanks down 5-3 in the 9th and two out. My first insight into the rivalry and a premonition of Chambliss' pennant winning homer one month later.

September 1978 - In the middle of the greatest comeback of all time, my dad and I watch the Yankees and Catfish Hunter beat the Sox again on Thurman Munson's RBI to drive in Mickey Rivers. I now fully understand why it matters.

August 1980 - I catch my one and only foul ball, hit by Reggie Jackson, and my play is on tv to boot. 25 years later, Sam will loathe me when he learns that I lost the foul ball several years later.

May 2003 - One of the top moments of my life, my first Yankee game with Ben and Sam. Yankees lose but Jeter hits a home run, making the game one for the ages. Enrique Wilson, a Yankee back up infielder, blows the game with a late inning error. We will all hate him for the rest of his career. When we have a catch and either Sam, Ben or I drop a ball, we will forever refer to it as an Enrique.

2004 - I'm not at the game but Ben, Sam and Jessie are because Sam won a promotion at Dick's when he knew Ron Guidry (49) and Don Mattingly's (23) numbers. He is learning the important math skills.

June 2005 - Yankees finally win a game attended by me, Ben and Sam against the Mets. But we aren't there to see it, since we left in frustration in he 6th inning when the Yankees were losing.

June 2007 - The Yankees crush the Pirates, and Sam's hero, Arod, hits two home runs. We stay for the whole game, a first for me, Ben and Sam.

August 2007 - Sam and I sit in the right field bleachers (the high priest's seat at Mecca) and see eight Yankee homers, none of which is Arod's 500th.


I will definitely get misty (of course I do this for compelling long distance ads) when I walk out of the Stadium for the last time. I never thought I'd outlive it.

Purpose of Exercise

I am currently wrestling with whether exercise should be more of a pursuit of overall fitness or of goals. These two are not mutually exclusive but they can sometimes run in opposition. For example, in my opinion, running 16 miles is not as good for you as running 6 miles. 16 overtaxes your muscles, harms your joints and there is diminishing return beyond 30 minutes of exercise to the cardiovascular system. I offer no scientific proof to this statement, just my own physical experience. On the other hand, if you are goal oriented and want to run a marathon at continuously faster times, you must run 16+ miles several times a month.

There are the other issues as well such as mental wellness. It is motivating and uplifting to successfully train for an endurance event. The training gives you a purpose in your life, gives your workouts more focus and tacking difficult assignments is good for the ego. On the other hand, it can be draining on a Friday night to know you have to run 18 miles or bike 60 miles or do both the next morning. Exercise can become a chore, not a religious ceremony.

And then there is vanity. To succeed in endurance events, you must be rail thin. Carrying excessive weight, whether it is muscle or fat, isn't good for half ironman times. But it is good for confidence (the muscle) and attracting the opposite sex. Again, no scientific studies to support this assertion.

Ringo the Zen Master

Ringo, seems like he has it all together. He knows exactly what he wants in life - food, attention, sleep, faces and hands to lick, occasional walks so he can pee and dump (and occassionally combine the dump with snack of the same) and a consistent flow of dog butts to smell. And he goes after it without any apology or hesitation. There is none of the human genuflection and whining about what should be doing with my life, I am too busy, I owe to much money, I am not good looking enough.

It's not that Ringo gets everything that he wants. He hears "no Ringo" all day but it doesn't send him into a downward, whoa is me spiral of depression. He moves on to the next moment when he might hear yes. He doesn't base his current actions on past events, or worry about the future for which he has no control. All that matters to him is solving the present.

Screw Stephen Covey, Deepak Chopra and Tony Robbins. Ringo is my zen master.

Online Persona

There are lots of options for creating your persona in the Internet age. The one I am going for is the fitness obsessed, witty geek. I am not sure if this is exactly who I am but that's what I want others to perceive.

The methods of delivering this message are:

The blog - www.themerrilllife.blogspot.com. Given the narrow focus of my posts, and the sporadic nature of them, there isn't a huge audience. This aint no white people blog yet. Considerations: do I open up with personal, private details about my life to build the persona?

Facebook/Linked In - I still don't get this phenomena yet. I played the game - add as many people to my friend list as possible - but it's kind of ended there. Other then Scrabulous.

Twitter (merrillfr) - I am loving this so far. It is the perfect solution for someone who gets bored at long conversations and would prefer exchanging one sentence quips. Of course a lot of people are not the best quippers - unless discussing how busy they are is considered riveting.

Podcast - My podcast is now approaching 100 downloads a week. Nothing Nielsen worthy yet but I think this means the audience is more then just friends. The personality hasn't really been injected in it yet; I haven't opened up myself Howard Stern style yet. And I don't know if that would even be interesting.


The challenge is now how to link all the techniques above to become famous. Because, in reality, that is the goal.

Ode to New Resource Bank

The beauty about exercise is that there is not really any downside to it. You look hot, you can eat as much as you want, it gives you confidence, it's a legitimate hobby, etc. The New Resource Bank is a similiar no brainer. I joined the bank about two months ago driven by two things.

First, the bank is dedicated to environmental issues, both in its operations (e.g., small global footprint, LEED certified headquarters) and in its decisions on the businesses with which it does business. This makes me feel good, that I am in small way making a difference.

Second, this focus on green issues is not at the expense of a customer-focused approach. While they are growing quickly, they treat each customer like they are important, as opposed to Wells Fargo's "I don't care about you, customer 1,222,444" approach. And get this. Even though they have much fewer assets than Wells, they charge no monthly fees AND reinburse any ATM fees incurred from competitor's machines.

They had me at hello.

I'm finally mobile

I have figured out how to use mobile blogger. Live scene from my power office.

Merrill and Sam

Merrill and Sam - January 2008 in Hunter, NY

What now?

Whenever I am in the middle of the all consuming training for an endurance event like a marathon or a triathlon, I can't wait for it to be over so I can return to more normal, singular daily workouts in which I can seek pure fitness and fun. And then the minute I finish the race and am working out without a specific goal, I start to feel aimless. This Catch 22 situation is compounded by three other factors.

1) It is really hard for me to peak for a specific race because I have an addictive and insecure personality. If I workout for less than 45 minutes, I feel anxious, bloated and lethargic. Miss one workout and I feel like my whole "endurance guy" persona is a fraud, my abs soft and my will to get up at 5:00 am damaged. With this baggage to deal with, I am not particularly good at tapering before a race or resting when sick or injured. I know this hurts my race performance but my psyche is willing to concede a few minutes for the emotional fix of the daily workout.

2) In the last year, I have learned that doing a race a second or third time, particularly if I did well the first time, is not fun. Vineman 2007 and the 2007 New York Marathon were nowhere near as fun as the first time I did them. I am not sure if I am bored of doing the same distances (half ironman, half marathon, marathon) as well or if I need to do completely new races. Whatever it is, there is currently no race out there that has me excited.

3) I am getting old and am probably about to start slowing down. I am not sure if it is the residual affects of the January flu, running in the winter morning or the December hamstring problem but my habitual 8 mile run has gotten slower by a minute or two. I will give it a month to see if I recover before panicking.

So I am searching for the next endurance fix.

Parenting

Ben has now reached 14 and his gift to me is he doesn’t like me. I encroach on his freedom, his independence, his cool factor. The group message is that this is the normal rite of passage for a teenager but it is hard not to take it personally. To accept that the boy who I have watched grow from a tiny little baby is now permanently angry at me and there is nothing I can do to change this other than bribery and gifts. It is payback or the way I acted to my parents as a 14-21 year old but that doesn’t make it easier to take.

The counterweight to this is that Sam still likes being with me. We just spent an awesome weekend together snow boarding, discussing sports, going to his basketball game where he was awesome, watching movies and bonding. He even told me he loves me in response to my many similar proclamations. Of course part of me thinks that this can’t last, that his teenage years are coming and I’ll get shunned for a second time. But I am relishing the time while I got it.

I know that I can’t take it personally – that being a good father is not about being liked, it’s about respect and being a good role model. But it is hard not to let my emotions run rampant when one of the two most important people in the world doesn’t want to be with me and there is nothing I have done other than exist.

Of course I am compounding this by reading the uplifting book The Road.

Update

In Kingston, NY Holiday Inn skimming free WiFi, waiting to go on client calls. Random thoughts.

• The Shield is the best TV cop show ever, beating my previous passion, Hill Street Blues, by a mile. Mackey, the main character and dirty cop is even more lovable and hateable than Tony Soprano. I am going to shave my head and fatten up my neck in his honor.

• I don't get Facebook. I thought I did, that it was a passive aggressive way to keep up with a few of your real friends, pretend to have some type of relationship with hundreds of others and engage in exciting activities like online scrabble. But after a few months of this ground breaking activity, it has ceased to be a buzz creator. Microsoft must be freaking over their investment. At least the value of Yahoo! makes sense.

• The audience for the Hack and the Flack has almost doubled in the last two months. OK - that means it has gone from 22 to 44 faithful downloaders but the stats don't lie. I think its time to do some news breaking on it to really drive traffic. My attempt to tie Lance to the murder of Heath Ledger (Mary Kate Olsen was supposed to be the smoking gun in a vicious love triangle) didn't have the desired effect.


• I am the ultimate front runner sports fan. No sooner did the Patriots lose to the Giants in the Super Bowl then I was writing them off as joyless cheaters. Brady still might be a great quarterback but his limping with flowers, yapping at Giselle's heels and his quiet, solo pondering on the bench took him out of the Jeter room of greatness. Jeter doesn't genuflect on the bench, he leaps to the top of the dugout to congratulate his teammates.

• I can't make a decision on Hillary vs Barack. OK - I did make a decision and voted for Barack in the Calif primary after listening to Slate podcast comparing him to Bobby and John but he is not inspiring me with his constant not red, not blue but united cliche. Barack is supposedly the inspirer, Hillary the doer. Inspirers can win nominations but can they govern. West Virginia voters will decide on May 18 - can't wait for another three months of over analysis.

• I am almost back to my normal level of endurance. From Thanksgiving to late January I suffered a hamstring pull and flu/bronchitis that had me miss two, count them two days of exercise. Somehow I survived this crisis without alientating Rebecca or my friends.

Specificity of Sport

Running and lifting everyday does not really prepare you for anything other than being able to run and lift everyday. Sure, there is the race across the airport to catch a plane or the challenge of opening a bottle top but they are few and far between.

But then there is a test. A touch football game. That seems like a good challenge for a 42-year old against a bunch of late 20 somethings (a handicap I face in dating a late 20 something woman). Unfortunately, the above paragraph still applies. So despite my teammates exhorting everyone to "get the ball the Ironman, he is really fast," we were crushed and I did little to help. In football there are no 3rd and 7.5 miles and blocking a 200 pound person is not at all like benchpressing 200 pounds. So for all the good working out did me on the football field, I might as well have been drinking, smoking and eating lots of french fries (wait, I already do that).

Plus I have a sore hamstring to boot.

Super Jews

Last night I went to a Friday dinner with a bunch of people I refer to as Super Jews, people who believe and observe the customs of Judaism with a serious commitment. I do have a number of Jewish friends but almost all of them share my apathy/agnosticism so I was borderline shocked that there exist people under 40 who act like a character from Fiddler on the Roof. I have nothing against it - it just came as a shock. Who knew there were after dinner prayers, the religious liquour.

After leaving the dinner, I got in a debate with my girlfriend on whether or not I understood the source of the Super Jews passion. I think that I do, that it is relatively the same level of spirtuality I feel during an endorphin rush or when I hang out with Ben and Sam or listen to the B-52s. It defines my purpose for being here, what drives me each day.

Which got me to thinking about my contemplation on adding more activities or interests to my repertoire. Get out of the box. But is that really the issue. Do I need to do more stuff or be more committed to what stirs me? Pursue my own form of religion, not add others.

Just start talking

If you have nothing to say, then just start talking and you'll end up saying something. 42 years old, no visible inprint or mark left on society. Yet.

It's 8:01 p.m. and it is no longer time for practice or planning. That can still be done but not as the step, but a step. Just start moving, with each step having a purpose but it not being about landing.

I swear this will make sense.

House

The thing that fascinates me about House, the latest medical TV drama, is that the hero has deep passion for his career but pursues it without a care for how he is perceived or for others rules or moral codes. The purity for what he is doing and for how he does it is bizarre and inspiring.

There are lots of real Houses. There is my girlfriend's enormous passion and love for her family, my emotional dejection at a poor marathon followed by the reinvigoration of the desire to go after it yet again, my rebonding with my two boys every time I see them, and the rare client who sees their company and job as more than a paycheck or resume builder.

It means no compromise, no 2nd place, no fear of consequences. It means 3.19.59, emotional vulnerability, no cable and and no time clock.