arik.org

A wonderful shot from Maggie of tonight’s sunset over Manhattan, just in time for Halloween. Click here to see it full size, and here to see her other fabulous photos on Twitpic.

This is what the satellite pictures show of the Northeast tonight. In a few hours I’m expected to board a JetBlue flight to San Francisco for MacWorld. Given the image at right, what are the chances that I make it? Pretty poor. I spent the better part of the evening calling all over the city for a car service that wasn’t booked solid. (Who knew lousy weather prompts people who would otherwise take the subway to work suddenly think it makes sense to spring for a car service? I certainly didn’t.) In any event, I’m expecting Monday is going to be a one-of-a-kind travel adventure, fraught with long lines, impatient waits on the runway, and the kind of fun and games that only JFK International can deliver when the weather goes to Hell. To keep it fun and interesting (for myself at least) I’ll be blogging via Blackberry along the way. Stay tuned. My car arrives in only a few hours!

I don’t do much on Facebook, but I’ve become addicted to playing Scrabulous, an online version of Scrabble. I have been over the last few months, battling through a best-of-seven series against Shel Israel, co-author with Robert Scoble, of Naked Conversations, who I’ve known since I wrote the series of stories on Jambo for Forbes. We’re now into our sixth game: I’m leading three games to two, and as of this writing am ahead by 31 points. Here’s a link to the game. Shel blogged about our match when it was only two or three games old here.

Yes, I know I practically never write anything here these days, but it’s not as I haven’t been busy. I’ve been, among other things, rebuilding my Web clips file, and so far I’ve got three quarters of 2007 done, after which I’ll go back and do similar pages for 2006, 2005, and then the FDC years (2000 to mid-2005) all following the same format. After that I’ll go through the years at EN, IW, NCN, and if time and resources allow, digitize the stuff from before that. (No small feat, that.)

But so far this year, and not counting anything from the first quarter, I’ve written 63 stories, 14 Byte columns, five magazine stories and recorded 40 videos (not counting the one I shot today). Look for yourself:

Second Quarter

Third Quarter

Fourth Quarter to date

Of course none of this reflects what I really spend most of my day doing: Deflecting PR pitches from industry neophytes who haven’t done their research into what I cover, but figure since I cover “technology” that I’ll naturally be interested in their client. They’re the ones who clearly haven’t read any of my recent stories because for some reason they don’t think its necessary because my name is on some list their boss has given them and as such they’re expected to call me, but not smart enough to speak up and say “Hey boss, I don’t think this is Arik’s cup of tea.” Yes, they’re the same ones who are audibly irritated when I tell them I’ve never 1) heard of their client, and 2) have no use a meeting as there’s zero chance I’ll ever write about them and 3) try to find some “angle” that they think will keep me interested, all the while running up the bill they’ll submit to their clients. And yes, I’ll admit: I can sometimes be quite harsh in my rejections, and think nothing of hanging up on an unprepared PR flunkie mid-pitch. It isn’t pleasant, but I have a lot to do, and limited time.

In any event, the above scenario should be less frequent as I finish the build-out of the archives. Even the laziest of PR professionals can Google my name, click on the first link (or third; it varies) and navigate to the “clips” section, and find an itemized list showing what I’ve written recently, and for that matter, in the distant past. Or at least that’s the idea. So ever so slowly, I’ll get these pages built, if only to give the flacks a crutch, and maybe spare myself some unnecessary phone calls.

Over the weekend, I tried to put up a live stream of some John Lee Hooker tunes I have stashed in my iTunes playlist (8 hours worth!) using a program called Nicecast. It didn’t work, despite my best efforts to figure it out. So here’s the next best thing, a couple of live tunes from my bootleg holdings. So here at least is a sample of what I had in mind. The first track, Serves Me Right To Suffer is taken from a 1976 session in Chicago. The other is a 13-minute rendition of Boogie Chillin’ from a performance in Montigny Les Metz, France in either 1981 or 1983. So, at least now you have an idea of what I had in mind. And yes, it still seems like a good day to play the blues.