The guys at Charmin are running a great promotion in Times Square. They've opened a restroom station. It has great music and a fun staff that cleans each toilet between uses! I love this idea! A fantastic way to bank some goodwill credit and advertise their outstanding bathroom product. If you're in NY you should check it out.

I know it's still early, but this was a great way to start a journey to the city. It's going to be a zoo in the Square. Rockefeller was crazy last night!

My friend has a cool Nokia with a 3 or 4 megapixel camera and it just puts my Dash to shame. Which means that now I'm in the market for a new phone.

Here are some things I care about in weighted order of importance:


So any ideas?

Right now I am considering the HTC Touch Cruise and the HTC TyTN II. But I'd love to find some more options to choose from. Surely there are other choices?

These past few days I've been taking some time to reflect and recreate, visit with family, and generally unwind.

As I was working through some quiet time about where I should put my energy in this coming year, I realized how frequently I fail to find directions and clarity from my compatriots. I'm not so fiercely independent, decisive, arrogant, or self-centered (although these are my core attributes) as to not seek out their input. On the contrary, I relentlessly pursue the knowledge of others to better myself.

Can you answer me?
No more time for questioning
My car's outside I want to leave
Don't you think I'm interesting
Well, I'm listening.

Everything's obvious
The way you put your hand on me
The way you talk so easily
The way your lips are glistening
Well, I'm listening.

You get around, You want me
You come around, You need me
This time around, I won't be back at all

Maybe misery is what I need to keep my sanity
And I don't mean if things don't go my way
I'll be pleased to meet you

And maybe yesterday was a day that I could get away
Now today I'm stuck in sanity
And I'm pleased to meet you

Right now I think I'm sane,
But I'm really just anxious
To cross that bridge, the subconscious oasis
Where right is right, and wrong is wrong
And you weren't there to build me up

You get around, You want me
You come around, You need me
This time around, I won't be back at all

Maybe misery is what I need to keep my sanity
And I don't mean if things don't go my way
I'll be pleased to meet you (pleased to meet you)

And maybe yesterday was a day that I could get away
Now today I'm stuck in sanity
And I've seen it all, I've seen it all
Many times before

-- Maybe Misery from When All That's Left Is You by Quietdrive

I guess when it comes down to it you can ask questions and then you can listen. If you are just waiting to talk you'll probably miss what's important. If you give up and stop listening, you'll never hear the answers you'd like. If you think you know the answers, then just stop talking already.

Why can't I ever just leave those conversations?

When it comes to persuasion and the arts of influence, your primary gift is your voice. Surely there are other techniques that sophisticated and experienced people use, but by far, it's the voice.

Not only do we communicate multiple layers of information with our words, but there is a tremendous amount of additional impact in our tones, our pitch, and our pacing. You can certainly read more about how to use tone and pacing in my other writings; in this post I want to talk about whining. Specifically how you can use the power of the whine to overcome obstacles.

The obstacles that whining is great for removing are objections. Objections are the reasons we give to justify our movement or lack of movement. They answer the question "Why could/should/would we do. . ." or "Why we can't/won't do. . ."

Objections are a natural and necessary part of any negotiation. During the persuasion process you either overcome them and achieve influence, or you don't. Whether you succeed or not, objections can provide a ton of information about the person objecting. You can find out about their needs and motivations, their discovery and planning processes, and so much more. I'll save decoding objections for another post.

Handling obstacles before you encounter them is a great way to smooth the way for your negotiation. Whining is a great way to deal with them before they ever become a problem.

If you want to be able to address objections before they are presented, you first have to forecast what the likely objections might be. There are many ways to figure these out but generally playing devil's advocate for your discussion or running a practice negotiation with a friend beforehand are great ways to discover possible objections.

Once you've predicted the obstacle, you can disarm it by using the power of the whine. As part of laying out your discussion, present the obstacle with a whiny, annoying voice. You can play it for comedic effect, use hand-gestures, and really get into it. The more whiny and annoying it is, the better. No one wants to be associated with such pitiful tonality and obnoxious behavior. So instinctively they will distance themselves from the objection.

For example, work into the discussion about price "Some people say It's Too Expensive!" and whine obnoxiously on the italics. The same can be done for other common objections like I'm Too Busy, or I've Never Done That Before.

For maximum effect, put the whiny bits into a larger sentence with a positive outtake. Such as "Sometimes people say: Doesn't That Require Specialized Knowledge, but the training in our class is open to everyone including beginners!". Having a positive outcome doesn't just push them away from the objection, it gives them something to hold onto so they work with you to convince themselves.

Next time you need to be persuasive, put the power of whining to work for you.

Overheard: If you are on a dive bars list, you aren't a dive bar.

Visiting the family in Phoenix and we are partaking of the huge Claim Jumper portions.

gustav's at pdx has great service. My weekend was coming to a close. We are sending it out in style.

Yes, they do have one in Astoria. Go figure.
The grub is great, the people are hilarious.

On the beach this morning for a long walk listening to music and just getting lost in the wonder. As is typically the case, a particular song stuck out in my head. I'm still trying to figure out why. Entries like this one sometimes help me understand what I'm thinking about; what's going on inside of me.

Before this world starts up again
It's me and night
We wait for the sun
The kids and drunks head back inside

Well there's lots of smart ideas
In books I never read
When the girls come talk to me
I wish to hell I had

Get up, Get up
Turn the ignition
Get up, Get up
Fire up the system
Play my little part in something big

I'll accept with poise with grace
When they draw my name from the lottery
And They'll say "all the salt in the world couldn't melt that ice"
I'm the one who gets away
I'm a New Jersey success story
And They'll say "Lord give me the chance to shake that hand"
They'll say

Back when I was younger
I was someone you'd have liked
Got an old guitar I had for years I'd let you buy
And I'll tell you something else
That you ain't dying enough to know
There's still some living left when your prime comes and goes

Get up, Get up
Dance on the ceiling
Get up, Get up
Boy you must be dreaming
Rock on young savior
Don't give up your hopes

I'll accept with poise with grace
When they draw my name from the lottery
And They'll say "all the salt in the world couldn't melt that ice"
I'm the one who gets away
I'm a New Jersey success story
And They'll say "Lord give me the chance to shake that hand"

I have one last wish
And it's from the heart
Just let me down
Just let me down easy

I'll accept with poise with grace
When they draw my name from the lottery
And They'll say "all the salt in the world couldn't melt that ice"
I'm the one who gets away
I'm a New Jersey success story
And They'll say "Lord give me the chance to shake his hand"
They'll say

-- Big Casino by Jimmy Eat World

I guess we all want some form of vindication. We all have a deeper desire to be noticed and understood and feel like we stood out and succeeded. And we're all making deals with devils, inside and out, real and imagined.

They tell such a story. Millions of seperate grains come together to paint a single picture.

Kicking off the vacation. Two days in Seaside. It's freezing and that's perfect.

If that title didn't mean anything to you, ignore this post. (Well, you can click an advert on the right first! ;-)

Just recently I've updated my laptop to the latest Windows operating system release named Vista. Since I'm out in the field, I don't have a nice persistent connection to my corporate network and Exchange mailbox. After installing Office 2007 (which I'd been using for some time and can say is quite good!) I needed to get my email configured again. So I point and clicked everything as it was configured before. Alas, no joy.

After researching a bit online including a very poorly worded and far too succinct KB article (found here), I got it running again. I've listed the important steps below, skip them at your peril.

1. Open regedit or your other favorite registry editing tool.
   If this is unfamiliar go get your geeky computer friend to help. You can really screw things up playing in the registry, so only do this if you know what you are about.
   
   
2. Locate the following subkey:
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\RPC
   You might not have the RPC portion of the key. I didn't. Just create it if missing.
   
   
3. Add a new DWORD value named DefConnectOpts with a value of 0.
   You have to get the name correct, and make sure the value is set to zero.
   
   
4. Restart your machine.
   This is usually the first step I skip. You can't do it this time. It won't take effect until restart. There probably is a service or .dll that can just be unloaded, but what a hassle. Keep it simple and just reboot.
   
   
5. Delete the profile you had, and recreate it with valid settings.
   At this point it should let you login to your Exchange server via RPC over HTTP. If it didn't you probably skipped a step or hit that special "you're screwed" portion of code. Call your techie friend.
   
   

My default Vista install did not have the RPC portion of the above key. So, I just created the key, then added the new value. I first deleted the old profile, then rebooted the computer. I created a new profile and it worked. Your mileage may vary.

The following is a great story sent to me by a friend on the importance of not making assumptions. I have no idea of the original source...

In 1986, Mike Membre was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from Northwestern University.

On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed, so Membre approached it very carefully.

He got down on one knee and inspected the elephant's foot and found a large piece of wood deeply embedded in it. As carefully and as gently as he could, Membre worked the wood out with his hunting knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot.

The elephant turned to face the man, and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments. Membre stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned, and walked away. Membre never forgot that elephant or the events of that day.

Twenty years later, Membre was walking through the Chicago Zoo with his teenaged son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Membre and his son Cantri were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Membre, lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man. Remembering the encounter in 1986, Membre couldn't help wondering if this was the same elephant.

Membre summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Membre' s legs and raised him high into the air then slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly.

Probably wasn't the same elephant.

Funny but poignant. I sit at my desk listening to conversations every day watching people walk up to their own elephants with nothing more than a vague hope or some wishful thinking. Sometimes I catch them in time. Most of the time I don't. It's a great show though.

This past week I've been able to catch up with some friends I haven't seen for a while. It started me thinking about what makes my real life-long friends so fantastic. And why I can't seem to get past the starting blocks with new friends in my ever expanding social circle. Then I remembered a conversation I'd had long ago about the 80/20 rule.

In summary, the 80/20 rule as it applies to relationships is that you spend eighty percent of the time doing normal, every day, won't-blow-your-kilt-up stuff, and twenty percent having important, intimate, life-changing experiences. With most relationships you will never get to the sweetest twenty without investing all the basic and normal eighty.

In my own life, I have some really good eighty percent friends. We don't have much pretense, it is about realism, trust, and relaxation. The more real we are, the more we trust, the more we relax. Everyone needs people like that in their life. The people you don't mind seeing you before you've got make-up on; who you never call for bail money, because they're sitting in the cell next to you. In friend terms, these are keepers. You find these in the romance department, just not as often as everyone would like.

The reason this gets interesting for romance is that we have a tendency to sample these experiences in random orders that can leave you drained and devoid of any lasting connection. For example, that drunken hook-up that finally made it clear to you why they call it wild-monkey-sex; the office mate you've been flirting up for weeks and finally find yourself shoulder to shoulder with in the supply closet.

[after surviving the bus explosion]
Annie: You're not going to get mushy on me, are you?
Jack: Maybe. I might.
Annie: I hope not, 'cause you know, relationships that start under intense circumstances, they never last.
Jack: Oh yeah?
Annie: Yeah, I've done extensive study on this.

[the last lines in the movie]
Jack: I have to warn you, I've heard relationships based on intense experiences never work.
Annie: OK. We'll have to base it on sex then.
Jack: Whatever you say, ma'am.

-- from the movie Speed

It is pretty common for us to get a taste of the sweet 20 upfront and assume it will be the norm for the remainder of the relationship. It isn't until we've invested significantly more time that we realize we already milked the best out of it and what we are left with is more like orange juice after toothpaste.

Like a cake, or maybe a fine wine, any relationship will have different flavors as it bakes (or ages). This isn't just normal, it's the point. Only expect a relationship to stay the same when the two parties involved aren't growing either. In this world, it is pretty hard to stop growing. Life has a tendency to drag you kicking and screaming into potty-training, sleeping in a big-boy bed, and pajamas with no feet whether you like it or not. So it helps to not just accommodate the changes, but expect and maybe even embrace it a little. You never know, you just might get a little taste of the sweetness if you take the time to savor.