It's Football Time in Tennessee

Living downtown provides a whole new perspective to professional sports. Having worked for the University of Tennessee Police Department I understand all of the security that goes into a major ball game. But, Nashville takes it to a whole new level with street closures and traffic direction and everything unimaginable.

For instance, right now there are three marked police cars, three horses and about 12 police officers all standing right outside of my building. I understand my proximity to the LP Field, home of the Tennessee Titans, but I cannot believe how much of an inconvenience all of this riff raff is to everyone living here.

Sure, I'll walk across the river and see the game. Total cost? Nothing, a friend gave me a ticket, I live right across the river and I know better than to pay $8 for a beer there. What about everyone else? I figure the average cost, between fuel, tickets, parking, refreshments and souveniers must be around $80 per person. That doesn't even take into account how much your time is worth and how much is spent just trying to find a place to park.

So, to all of those die hard fans out there that sit on the backed up interstate and drive around aimlessly looking for any parking spot that costs less than $25 and is within a mile of the venue, I salute you. To those of thus that live downtown, don't have to fight the traffic, and can just walk across the river to see the game: isn't it a bitch that you have to park 3 blocks away just to unload your groceries?

All By Myself

When I was young
I never needed anyone
And makin' love was just for fun
Those days are gone

Livin' alone
I think of all the friends I've known
But when I dial the telephone
Nobody's home

All by myself
Don't wanna be, all by myself anymore
All by myself
Don't wanna live, all by myself anymore

Hard to be sure
Sometimes I feel so insecure
And love so distant and obscure
Remains the cure

All by myself
Don't wanna be, all by myself anymore
All by myself
Don't wanna live, all by myself anymore

When I was young
I never needed anyone
And makin' love was just for fun
Those days are gone

All by myself
Don't wanna be, all by myself anymore
All by myself
Don't wanna live, all by myself anymore

All by myself
Don't wanna be, all by myself anymore
All by myself
Don't wanna live, all by myself anymore

Five Things I Hate About MySpace

Alright, I'm sure anyone in the blogosphere or geeky enough to find and or read this probably has a MySpace account. There are quite a few things that I am starting to find annoying about MySpace. Actually, I have found these to be annoying for quite some time.

First and foremost, I think we can all agree that the number one most annoying thing about MySpace is the advertisements. According to an article in BusinessWeek, Google has a $900 million advertising deal alone. The article states that advertising on social networking sites such as MySpace has the least amount of click through, a mere 4 clicks per 100,000 impressions compared to 20 through out the rest of the web.

Facebook, however tames down their advertising opportunities with a more focused approach. If you have a Facebook account (I don't know who reading this doesn't) you probably notice that advertising is minimal and always somehow pertains to you. The use of Customer Relationship Management is what causes this. All of that data that you put in Facebook about your income, your age, what kind of food you like, that is all being used to target specific advertisements to you.

The use of this information has been long questioned. Demographics have always been used to test the effectiveness of advertising and test audience populations, but now in Web 2.0 we are seeing a whole new type of advertisement. Instead of television, where the ads are targeted to who they assume is watching the material, such as Sports Illustrated commercials on EPSN, or grill commercials on Food Network, now we are starting to see ads which are specifically targeted at you based on the information you provide the website with.

Honestly, as long as no personally identifiable information is being released, I have no problem in only dealing with advertisements that somehow affect me. Now what really bothers me, is why MySpace hasn't caught on and Facebook seems to be on the top of the heap in this arena. I know there are millions of MySpace vs. Facebook blog posts out there, and probably a hundred websites dedicated just to this debate, but I wanted to spend a few paragraphs to highlight the rest of my frustrations with MySpace.

A close second, after ridiculous advertising is the unsolicited add requests. I do not mind receiving a few credit card offers in the mail. I do not mind if the newspaper calls me to offer me a special subscription rate. However, I cannot stand logging into MySpace every day and marking 30 add requests as "Spam." I think we all have spam filters on our e-mail, why can't MySpace cut the crap out? I don't think captcha's are going to solve this problem. Why is it that Craigslist posts are flagged and removed in a matter of minutes, but some of these spambots can have profile pages including up to 500 friends before a flag is raised? Maybe that too is part of the advertising deal. One can only wonder.

The third thing I hate about MySpace is the inability to change your e-mail address. Surely over the course of ones life jobs change, schools change, Internet Service Providors change. Why on earth would a company expect me to keep the college e-mail address I signed up with as my permanent address for their services? I just pity the kid at my university that ends up with my recycled e-mail address and a whole lot of MySpace spam. If there is any good out of this, I don't have to receive any crap in my e-mail reminding  me exactly why I hate MySpace.

Coming in forth place is the most absurd picture uploading process I have ever seen. I don't even need to explain this. Just try to upload your pictures from the weekend when you get to work or from behind a firewall. 

Fifth place is the silly idea of applications. Now this was something that was done tastefully by Facebook. However, MySpace fails again by cluttering profiles and spamming junk all across their system. Seriously, look at almost any celebrity's profile which does not enforce comment review, and you will literally see 500 comments talking about "how I got a free laptop."

With just those few examples and all of the frustration caused, I guess I'll just have to stick to Facebook. Just whatever you do, don't poke me.

Summer Nights in the City

Alright,

So I am just getting back into this after a really long hiatus. I haven't been blogging in a very long time for reasons unknown.

I'm not really sure what the purpose of this blog is going to be. I just know that I enjoy writing and it has been a very long time since I have written anything in particular outside of technical documents at work.

I guess to give you a little update, I work at a hotel in downtown Nashville and live in a historic building in a loft with the crappiest view I have ever had. In the past two years I have posted numerous videos to YouTube. Most of them completely nonsense. I have been trying to find some things to do outside of working and partying to occupy my time, so I think blogging will suit me well.

I just opened a Twitter account and learned that the blogging community in Nashville is HUGE. I was amazed how many different people are blogging about so many different things. I think for the first few posts here, I'll be exploring some of the blogs in Nashville and sharing some of the ones that I am particularly interested in. Hopefully I will find some sort of direction here and start blogging about something in particular. In the mean time, bear with me and we'll try to make it through the first few weeks.

If you have any suggestions, ideas or criticisms that you would like to share, I am always open to hearing those. In the mean time, sit back, relax and enjoy while I figure out what on earth I'm doing here.